[Kazan]

Sorry venom.. i just couldn't see what you were talking about in your images and such - bobboau gave me a sphere with a white texture and it jumped out at me.


The solution was actually very simple - average the point normals for each vertex.

POF Constructor Suite now has smooth shading, future releases will have it (it's in the codebase now) so if you want to use it just wait for the next intermediate build

here's the screenshot

Upper Left - oldest pof compiler known [gary's] - before it had smooth shading

Upper Right - Gary's with smooth shading

Bottom - Mine now with smooth shading

 


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or the Guys that wrote an  operating system to use
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"Why Climb it?" - "Because it's there."

"God is dead." - Nietzsche
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[Bobboau]

now is the smooth shading going to be applied to all polys or just the ones with smooth shading aplied in TS (hopeing for option two)

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Bobboau, bringing you products that work.............. in theory

[Kazan]

all.. being that smooth shading is in the ShBx COB chunk i beleive and i dont interpret that chunk- and it would massively waste execution time to extract one data point from that huge block


FYI:

PCS's Compiler signature is now

Code: [Select]

Input was: %d Materials, %d Groups, %d Lights, and %d PolyGroups.
Started with %d and ended with %d points, in %d and %d faces respectively. Compile time was %d seconds. POF-CS Compiler v1.2.0 written by Kazan, with help from Gary Knudson and Aaltonen Kalle
Special Thanks to Etheral Entity, Venom and Bobboau.
------------------
Who do you trust?
The Guy that wrote an operating system to sell
or the Guys that wrote an  operating system to use
---------------

"Why Climb it?" - "Because it's there."

"God is dead." - Nietzsche
-----------------
FreeSpace 2: The Babylon Project Effects Nerd and Programmer.
Alliance Productions

[Bobboau]

mixing smooth and faceted is important in many situations,
I think you should look into it,
and I can tell you I don't care how long it takes,
untill then make it an option some were becase some models require faceded shading (Tarren models) rather than smooth.

if the shading wasn't a big deal we wouldn't have made such a big stink about it

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Bobboau, bringing you products that work.............. in theory

[Kazan]

i can add it later.. right now let me finish the renderer

then i'll be adding some more auto-blehs..

[aldo_14]

Should implement it as a function, have the call use a boolean to activate/deactivate the averaging methods in a simple if/else... really easy, so i wouldn't be too worried about waiting on it....

Anyway, you can just post the old & new versions up - one for smoothing, one without.

BTW, does the latest dl version have the smooth shading?

[Kazan]

Who can see the difference
old
 

new
 

[Shrike]

Mucho better.  Smooth shading is damn useful.

[Kazan]

 

Originally posted by aldo_14:
Should implement it as a function, have the call use a boolean to activate/deactivate the averaging methods in a simple if/else... really easy, so i wouldn't be too worried about waiting on it....

BTW, does the latest dl version have the smooth shading?

it is a function so a 'if' statement exclusion would be easy.. i'm looking at it right now actually because i think my last statement may have been in error

the latest intermediate build on the net does not have it

[Nico]

 

Originally posted by Bobboau:
mixing smooth and faceted is important in many situations,
I think you should look into it,
and I can tell you I don't care how long it takes,
untill then make it an option some were becase some models require faceded shading (Tarren models) rather than smooth.

if the shading wasn't a big deal we wouldn't have made such a big stink about it

yes, you're completly right. But for me, I won't be able to have multiple shadings  
why, coz the stupid TS liks shading to maps (???) when 3dsMax links them to the poly themselves. When I convert a max model, the smoothing data is lost. To have it back, I have to check the option of the map and reaply it. and ALL the polys with this map will have the same smoothing data. With TS you can have one smoothing per map, and not more. that's bad  
well, I can still have as many different smoothing than I have different maps...
BUT: boboau, you who knows TS very well, do you know if there's an option that comes along with the map smoothing to have only polys under a certain angle smoothed? like the autosmooth command, with, say, 45° of angle, esthetically the best angle?)

[Kazan]

yeah it's in Mat1 so each texture can have different faceting.. this could get interesting

[Nico]

 

Originally posted by Kazan:
Who can see the difference
old
 

I can  
but, honestly, on dark ships, smoothing is not obvious.

[aldo_14]

 

Originally posted by Kazan:
it is a function so a 'if' statement exclusion would be easy.. i'm looking at it right now actually because i think my last statement may have been in error

the latest intermediate build on the net does not have it

ok.  

Thank god for the 'import data' option then.... I'm gonna check out 1/2 of my fighters with smooth shading methinks  

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[Shrike]

Does it keep the smoothing of the model, from TS or MAX or whatever, or does it create new smoothing which is an average?

[Bobboau]

you can have more than one material with the same texture
so if you paint all the faces with the texture you want then swich the shading and repaint the faces that you want the shading it will save a diferent material with a diferent shading and the same texture PCS will place all textures together and the smoothing is part of the poly data

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Bobboau, bringing you products that work.............. in theory

[Thorn]

hmmm..
I may have to redo the acolyte then

[Kazan]

it'll be smooth shading or not

it creates it's own shading data because TS calculates it dynamically and doesn't save it to the file

[Bobboau]

in the vertion he just made it creates smoothing by averaging the normals of each vert, hopefully latter vertions will retain wich polys use smooth shadeing and wich use faceted shading, and maybe even autofaceting.

now if Kazan can just fix the bounding box (or was it SORTNORM) problems that make long thin things disapear if you go halfway past them (did I ever give you the model wich best shows this problem)

------------------
Bobboau, bringing you products that work.............. in theory

[Nico]

 

Originally posted by Kazan:
it'll be smooth shading or not

it creates it's own shading data because TS calculates it dynamically and doesn't save it to the file

ok, so I don't have to bother with that.
Anyway: I know how to have dofferent shadings, even with PCS making his own shading datas  
break the model in parts, where you want the shading to change. there's no shading between objects, so you'll have the lines well drawn, without shading  

[Nico]

 

Originally posted by Bobboau:
in the vertion he just made it creates smoothing by averaging the normals of each vert, hopefully latter vertions will retain wich polys use smooth shadeing and wich use faceted shading, and maybe even autofaceting.

now if Kazan can just fix the bounding box (or was it SORTNORM) problems that make long thin things disapear if you go halfway past them (did I ever give you the model wich best shows this problem)

for my part, i'd like PCS to save all the modification at the first time (it's not a big pb, just need to save several times, but wometimes, I just forget :þ). I didn't have thios pb with the last build, but woomeister told me he had, so...