EPICI opened this issue on Apr 23, 2009 · 14 posts
EPICI posted Thu, 23 April 2009 at 4:06 PM
Hi all
Can I load animated Poser characters in the EcoSystem of Vue 7?
Thank you.
EPICI
PS: this is the scene I wold like to create in Vue:
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php
AVANZ posted Fri, 24 April 2009 at 6:30 AM
Yes, I did a test once and it worked, but only with the local render, not HyperVue unfortunately. Also I used a very low poly character (less than 1500 polys in Vue) based on V4, but with all body parts replaced by box primitives.
Not sure how well it will work with a few hundred 80k characters! Keep you fire extinguisher ready...
EPICI posted Fri, 24 April 2009 at 6:53 AM
Quote - Yes, I did a test once and it worked, but only with the local render, not HyperVue unfortunately. Also I used a very low poly character (less than 1500 polys in Vue) based on V4, but with all body parts replaced by box primitives.
Not sure how well it will work with a few hundred 80k characters! Keep you fire extinguisher ready...
Cool!
I have to try.
My meshes are MidPoly (about 6000 poly each)... they should work well..
Yes, my fire extinguisher is always ready! : ))
EPICI
ajtooley posted Fri, 24 April 2009 at 4:34 PM
I did these in Vue Studio Pro 6:
Vue can be finicky with this stuff, but it is possible.
EPICI posted Sat, 25 April 2009 at 4:08 AM
Quote - I did these in Vue Studio Pro 6:
Vue can be finicky with this stuff, but it is possible.
Exactly what I would do.
But how do you arrange them in the opposite direction?
Can I also array soldiers by groups?
Thank you.
EPICI
Mazak posted Sat, 25 April 2009 at 4:19 AM
ajtooley posted Sat, 25 April 2009 at 9:52 AM
Thanks, Mazak. I uploaded them to youtube in the lousy-resolution days, but at least you can still see the ecosystems at work. If I have time today I'll upload another experiment at a better resolution.
EPICI, that's where Vue is finicky! What I did was create a plane (finite, not infinite), set its texture to transparent so that there wouldn't be a texture seam at its edge, and populated it with six or seven animated Poser figures. These were M3s with the MMP Viking add-ons. I ended up with about 15,000 figures. If I recall, I didn't force regular alignment because that would make them run in a perfectly, unnaturally square formation; a barbarian charge is not so coordinated. So by not forcing regular alignment but instead setting rotation to zero, they're populated randomly on the plane but running in the same direction. Whether you do this depends on how "trained" you want your soldiers to look. Then, to get my opposing charge, I simply copied and pasted the plane and rotated the whole thing 180 degrees. However, if I decided to change anything in the ecosystem, it would repopulate with them pointing in the original direction. I started animating a few times before realizing that! But it's a simple fix: repopulate if necessary after your changes, and then just remember to rotate the plane again before proceeding.
This is as far as I got with this particular experiment, and I've learned a few things since then but haven't applied them. I don't see why you couldn't array them in groups using either density maps or duplicated planes. Even in a single large group, a density map would be a good idea to produce ragged edges rather than perfect lines --unless you're wanting Greek-style phalanxes with more regular alignment.
I did the Barbarian Charge video with Vue 6 Pro Studio on a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB SDRAM. Render time was a little under 3 hours for the 5-second animation. It went that fast because I "cheated" by pre-rendering the sky and forested hill as a still and used it as a static backdrop, so the only thing really being rendered was the figures.
Hope this helps, and good luck!
ajtooley posted Sat, 25 April 2009 at 10:32 AM
Didn't take as long as I thought it would to upload the other animation. Here you go:
EPICI posted Sat, 25 April 2009 at 10:59 AM
Thanks ajtooley.
Your tips are useful.
As soon as I finish the second army, I try your technique.
Thank you.
EPICI
PS: last video is relly cool, too!
EPICI posted Sun, 03 May 2009 at 5:03 PM
ajtooley posted Sun, 03 May 2009 at 9:39 PM
Well done!
EPICI posted Mon, 04 May 2009 at 1:04 AM
Mazak posted Mon, 04 May 2009 at 2:02 AM
EPICI posted Mon, 04 May 2009 at 2:21 AM
