Wall Worm Displacement Tool

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Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Thu Mar 24, 2011 5:34 pm

Here's the next Wall Worm Tool. Make your terrain for Source in 3ds Max with the Wall Worm Displacement Tool.

This is just a preview of the tool. If anyone wants to help beta test it, feel free to email me. I hope to have a version for testing within a week.

Last edited by shawnolson on Sat Jul 30, 2011 1:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby Surfa on Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:23 pm

For your texture in the viewport problem just create a simple direct x shader that blends between two textures based upon the vertex colour. I think there are already some out there but I am not 100% sure on that.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby Jike on Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:30 pm

I'm no max user...

But in the end run this is a model, right? No source displacement as we know them, correct?
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Thu Mar 24, 2011 6:33 pm

Jike wrote:I'm no max user...

But in the end run this is a model, right? No source displacement as we know them, correct?


Wrong. This is exporting as actual displacements.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Thu Mar 24, 2011 9:55 pm

Surfa wrote:For your texture in the viewport problem just create a simple direct x shader that blends between two textures based upon the vertex colour. I think there are already some out there but I am not 100% sure on that.

Surfa... if you can direct me to one I'd be much obliged. The stock direct x shader FX list appeared promissing at first... but none seem to do what I want. I did some Google searches but nothing seems to be turning up... the most promising results seem to point to the commercial app Shader FX but I really don't feel like spending $250 on a program I think I'd only use once... but then again it may be useful more.

Anyway... if you or anyone else could send me a link to a resource for the Direct X shader to do this already, it would help get this ready for release faster.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby Terr on Thu Mar 24, 2011 10:19 pm

Very cool. I probably wouldn't use it (I haven't mapped in a while and don't have 3DS Max) but for whatever it is worth...

One of the tricky problems I had with displacements was ensuring that their "host" brushes were correctly aligned so that they could be sewn, especially when using less-than-regular quadrilaterals.

You may want to consider an editing mode that lets you easily move or snap/align the "original" (pre-displacement) planes, in a way which does not really alter the positions occupied by the post-displacement sculpted points.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby Surfa on Thu Mar 24, 2011 11:37 pm

shawnolson wrote:
Surfa wrote:For your texture in the viewport problem just create a simple direct x shader that blends between two textures based upon the vertex colour. I think there are already some out there but I am not 100% sure on that.

Surfa... if you can direct me to one I'd be much obliged. The stock direct x shader FX list appeared promissing at first... but none seem to do what I want. I did some Google searches but nothing seems to be turning up... the most promising results seem to point to the commercial app Shader FX but I really don't feel like spending $250 on a program I think I'd only use once... but then again it may be useful more.

Anyway... if you or anyone else could send me a link to a resource for the Direct X shader to do this already, it would help get this ready for release faster.



The polycount wiki has some good one including a vertex blending example but it goes over normal mapping and specular etc.. So if you just wanted the diffuse blending you could cut out a lot of the code.
http://www.ldaustinart.com/paul//shaders/MoP_TextureBlender.fx

The polycount wiki shader category
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryShaders

Also be sure to check out the tech-artists wiki
http://tech-artists.org/wiki/Portal:Shaders

Also if my memory serves me correct shader fusion is free for non commercial usage although I am normally wrong on stuff like this.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby LordDz on Fri Mar 25, 2011 2:26 am

If this works good, this mod will love you:
http://www.empiresmod.com
(Mostly all maps are made out of displacements).
Not trying to promote, just being a fanboi here.

But please PM me if you have a version working :)
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:08 pm

Terr wrote:Very cool...

You may want to consider an editing mode that lets you easily move or snap/align the "original" (pre-displacement) planes, in a way which does not really alter the positions occupied by the post-displacement sculpted points.

Thanks... good idea.
Surfa wrote:The polycount wiki has some good one including a vertex blending example but it goes over normal mapping and specular etc.. So if you just wanted the diffuse blending you could cut out a lot of the code.
http://www.ldaustinart.com/paul//shaders/MoP_TextureBlender.fx

...

Surfa... thanks for the resources. I've gone through some ... and it appears that I may have to learn more about making a Direct X Shader. I tried the MoP_TextureBlender ... but it isn't blending in my viewport. I never really understood the point of the direct x shaders until this dilemma! Every day is a new thing learned :)
LordDz wrote:If this works good, this mod will love you...But please PM me if you have a version working :)


I shall.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Fri Mar 25, 2011 1:24 pm

So it turns out that the shader fx problem is actually trivial. The direct x blend FX that comes with Max works... I was just testing it in the wrong manner--I was using vertex color instead of vertex alpha. So that problem is no longer an actual problem. Now to the design tools.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Wed Mar 30, 2011 3:18 am

Thanks for the input and ideas, guys.

I have a beta available now. There are some docs and a new video that shares some tips on the Wall Worm Displacement Tool as well as a link to download.

It's far from being finished... but it can now be used to design displacements inside Max.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Sat Apr 09, 2011 4:18 pm

Updated the tool today to version 0.6. I have not made progress on the actual displacement (design) tools... but I added a new feature during the export process.

Now, on export, the VMF the file creates will output prop_static or prop_physics entities for any Wall Worm Model Tools models in the scene. When used this way, make sure to use the "Use Local Origin as World Origin" setting for the WWMT models in the scene (and the "Flip" option if they are backwards in Hammer) for each model in the WWMT UI... which requires the WWMT 1.1 or later.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby SM Sith Lord on Fri Jul 29, 2011 11:10 pm

You may want to consider an editing mode that lets you easily move or snap/align the "original" (pre-displacement) planes, in a way which does not really alter the positions occupied by the post-displacement sculpted points.


This caused a lot of extra work for me while making Survivor in Hammer. I'd have to move some of the "original" brushes around for one reason or another, and as a result I would have to resculpt the shit out of the terrain to get it back to what it looked like before hand. :cry:
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby shawnolson on Sat Jul 30, 2011 1:56 am

SM Sith Lord wrote:This caused a lot of extra work for me while making Survivor in Hammer. I'd have to move some of the "original" brushes around for one reason or another, and as a result I would have to resculpt the shit out of the terrain to get it back to what it looked like before hand. :cry:


I wish I could say that I have made some kind of progress on this tool... as my own feelings are that the way we are forced to make displacements is essentially retarded. After working on this I think I've developed a picture on why Valve ended up with a system that is the way it is (in terms of displacements)... but honestly displacements are simply not artist-friendly.

It really should be completely arbitrary... put in a mesh and it compiles as a displacement.

Unfortunately, as we all know, that's not how it is.

My goal is still to create a system that for the artist is as simple as designating any random mesh as a displacement. Attached are a couple screen shots of my testing grounds.

displ_example1.png
example 1
(407.6 KiB) Not downloaded yet
displ_example2.png
example 2
(254.94 KiB) Not downloaded yet


The entire landscape is a single mesh. I am trying to build a system that just exports it as a set of displacements. What I want to be able to do is build complex landscapes as in those scenes in a way that the artists doesn't have to worry about anything like displacements lining up for sewing, being certain sizes, etc... all I want to worry about is modeling how I want it to look and painting the blends.

But the issue isn't too simple. To programatically guess at the correct Base Brush sizes/placements/orientation is very complex... and so far I just can't figure it out. It's going to take some kind of eureka moment... as I've run up against a wall on it. The dilemma is that the compile requires displacements to be tied to faces of brushes. The format has to be as if the user had designed everything in brush chunks.

Which is why this tool hasn't been updated. The current version that I've loaded to the internet doesn't offer anything that you can't do in Hammer... so in reality its only benefit is that you can model the basic landscape in 3ds along with your models and level (if you are using Convexity). I know there have been people wondering why you would even want to use it since you can already do it in Hammer. My own feeling is that you should do everything in Max if you own it... which is why this is important to me. But yes... as it stands, it's still easier to build your displacements in Hammer than use my tool.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that I will be able to make some progress on this.
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Re: Wall Worm Displacement Tool

Postby DillonBarba on Sat Jul 30, 2011 2:05 am

nice example shawn, got a screenshot of it imported into source?
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