Re: [Nel] multipart meshes, deforming, adding

[Cyril 'Hulud' Corvazier]

can you tell me also the status of implementing IK / HK chains

into export and animation. ( have to love those muscle flexing

animations ) ( picture a monters cracking knuckles and flexing before

he tears your head off and eats it LOL )

We use a old version of Character Studio, so i'm not sure to see exactly what it is. Anyway, we can simulate variety of 3dsmax animation tracks (see max_animation_support.txt), but no IK solver is provided. We recommand to use a biped skeleton. Use the Biped IK. NeL exporter will oversample the animation. If you have some memory trouble with this method (too much memory used by your animations), use our "anim_builder" animation compressor. It works pretty well.

another question is setting an alpha value for an overall character

is there an easy way to set a character so its semi transparent

or does each material of each mesh need a color (255,255,255,0) set

on it or something?

For each of your character mesh materials, you have to force the material blend mode to true and set a valid blend function. Don't forget to set the character as a transparency object else it will not be sorted correctly.

 

uint i;

for (i=0; i<instance->getNumMaterials(); i++)

{

    UInstanceMaterial &material = instance->getMaterial(i);

    material.setOpacity(opacity);    // set the alpha value of the material

    material.setBlend(true);            // set the material as blendable

    material.setBlendFunc(NL3D::UInstanceMaterial::srcalpha, NL3D::UInstanceMaterial::invsrcalpha);    // set the blend function to use : here it is "normal alpha blending"

    material.setZWrite(false);    // Don't write to the zbuffer

}

instance->setTransparency(true);    // Tell the mesh to belong to the transparent render list

instance->setOpacity(false);           // Tell the mesh to not belong to the non transparent render list

is there some instruction on vertex deformation in nel? for instance

mouth eyes nose haveing an offset and deforming the vertex to

make appearences different.

Yes, use blend shape (or morphing) for this. Copy your object in 3dsmax for each morph target you want. Deform them. Add a "morph" modifier to your main object. Load your morph targets into it. Animate the sliders. It should work in the NeL viewer. You can dynamically play with this sliders in your game using the method UInstance::setBlendShapeFactor (). Blend shapes are compatible with skinning and MRM.

for skin color of a mesh as another question altering the color

does this involve creating many shades of the texture and

pikcing one or can a color (tint) be applied to a texture or

material that will allow the white <> black or possibly green! :p

skin of a player character.

You can duplicate your texture for each color and change them in the instance material at runtime using the NeL instance interface:

 

uint i;

for (i=0; i<instance->getNumMaterials(); i++)

{

    UInstanceMaterial &material = instance->getMaterial(i);

    material.setTextureFileName("black_"+material.getTextureFileName());    // Choose the black texture version

}