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Old 13th September 2005, 06:44 PM   #11
blade13
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thanks for the extra effort griff!

what would be such ways you speak of that would be 'cleaner' than polyline>set surface to poly>extrude? being a novice user i am curious...

thanks again for your help :>

do you guys think that there is anyway around such an error? in other words, is there a way to draw a line that wouldnt necessarily be a poly w/ 2 vertices that would be a clean solution?
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Old 13th September 2005, 09:28 PM   #12
Dennis
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I don't know of any way around this particular problem. No matter how you arrange a line/polyline, you're still left with only 2 vertices per surface.

You have a few options that I can think of - the approach you end up with depends heavily on the point of view from which your players will see the chandelier (i.e., first person, third person top-down, side-scroll, etc)..

1. Replace each line with a cylinder. This is probably the most expensive approach for framerates in your game, as you're drawing at least 6 triangles where only a single line is needed, but this will probably give the best visual result as the number of sides in the cylinder increases.

2. Replace each line with a 2 sided rectangular polygon. If the player will be in a position to see the lines very closely, you may even want to texture a chain on the surface with transparency to make it look like a chandelier chain. The disadvantage here is if the user could walk around to the "side" of your rectangle, the chain will disappear (or at least it will become apparent that it's a 2-sided surface.

3. Do the last option of a single rectangle, but flag it in such a way that your code handles it as a billboard (if you haven't had experience with billboarding, Google for "3d billboarding" without the quotes). AC3D has a Data field associated with each object (hit F9 to bring it up while a single object is selected), which is great for sticking in hints about how to handle objects outside of AC3D.

4. Tweak the code that loads the models to handle these lines so you don't end up changing the model --- I don't know if this is an open source solution that you can modify like this...

There may be other options I'm not thinking of, but I hope this gets you started.

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Old 14th September 2005, 06:15 PM   #13
griff
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For the wire holding the chandelier, Dennis makes some useful suggestions. If it is not going to be examined in detail, I would make a tube ... using a single triangle as the cross-section. In the overhead view, create a single roughly equi-lateral triangle. Switch to front view, place it at one end of line, extrude it to the other end (1 section). Make it single-sided (inside surfaces not drawn), Remove caps from each end and scale it to get the right thickness. You now have a *wire* that is just 6 triangles with no inside surface. In vrml. you can set the smoothness to max ... helps *round it*

For the chandelier arms, in the front view, draw an ellipse (even number of points ... try 14 or 18 which gives you a surface parallel to X axis), set surface type to poly. Select the ellipse, then Surface--> Make hole (setting 80-90%).

Now, in vertex mode, hilite vertices in bottom half of the donut shape you have, then Surface --->Cut away object, and delete this new object.

Now, in top view, select the arch shape you have created, and extrude a suitable distance (Cap end, don't remove original). In Object mode, select it set to one sided surfaces.

In front view, distort shape as desired by scaling in X and Y direction , and by selecting groups or pairs of individual vertices. and moving them. Get into the vetex dragging business ;-)

Hope that gives you some ideas.

Note, for any object that will be a solid shape (you only see outside surfaces) get into the habit of setting surfaces to single-sided ... the outside. I don't know about your Java viewer, but in VRML this reduces triangles being drawn by viewer substantially.

Second note, if you have a solid object (eg a cylinder that you use for a column) and have set surfaces to one sided, you can delete the bottom surface that will be on the floor as it will never be seen. Another simple way to reduce triangles that are being drawn in your viewer.

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Old 15th September 2005, 09:11 PM   #14
blade13
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thank you all, esp griff + dennis

i am now using 1sided polys a lot even though the model you guys were messing with that i posted was incomplete :/ - thanks for the suggestions all!

heterosexual love,

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