DeleD Community Edition

Animeblood · Member Joined: 25 Feb 2005 Posts: 12

Hiya People! This here is the one and only Animeblood!

I was wondering how come whenI export .X files that are lightmapped in LITE version as I'm using them for DB and I use NGC for collision which doesnt like DBOS so I cant use those. Can anyone help me out as to why I dont get lightmaps exported as well?

Jeroen · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 6:23 pm Post subject:

Hi there Anime! Smile

Lightmapping requires multiple UV-coordinates per vertex (e.g one pair for the normal texturemap and one pair for the lightmap) but .X files don't support that.

Animeblood · Member Joined: 25 Feb 2005 Posts: 12

Argh. Then how come Cshop files can be exported with .x and still have lightmaps. Sad

?

Jeroen · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 7:08 pm Post subject:

Dunno, maybe he's using a different form of .x? Question

Paul-Jan · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 7:34 pm Post subject:

No. Carthography shop exports two .x files: one for the normal materials, and one for the lightmap. Which is a very nice trick, but only Darkbasic Pro can read and combine those files (as far as I know: correct me if I'm wrong here). As we already have a plugin for straight export to DBO file format (including lightmaps), we didn't bother to implement such a 'export dual .x file' system.

ayufan · Member Joined: 17 Jan 2005 Posts: 8

No guys, you are wrong. X files can have more than one texture coordinate set.

Jeroen · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 10:31 am Post subject:

That sounds great! Do you have more info (url) for us to look at?

ayufan · Member Joined: 17 Jan 2005 Posts: 8

You can simple use direct3dx for it.
Or: http://msdn.microsoft.com/archive/default.asp?url=/archive/en-us/directx9_c/directx/graphics/reference/fileformat/xfileformat.asp

Jeroen · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 11:36 am Post subject:

Direct3d isn't an option, for we use OpenGL (and plan to keep it that way). We'll take a closer look to the link you've provided. Thanks!

ayufan · Member Joined: 17 Jan 2005 Posts: 8

Yes I know, but for exporting you can create temporary direct3d device.

Paul-Jan · Posted: Fri Aug 19, 2005 7:42 pm Post subject:

Ayufan, please be more specific. Where in those specs do you find evidence that .X files support multiple sets of texture coordinates? A Mesh has just one set of MeshTextureCoordinates, which is just one array of 2 coordinates, so how would one go about defining multiple sets?

Besides that, the point really isn't wether .X supports it (as .X is an extendible format, you can basically put in there whatever you want as long as you define your templates right), but wether there is a common standard that other programs will load. I don't know of any 3D renderer that supports multitextured .X files.

But please, prove us wrong if we are!

ayufan · Member Joined: 17 Jan 2005 Posts: 8

I have discovered it using 3dsmax when I was generating lightmaps (baking). To save scene as .X file with texture and lightmap coordinates I used Panda DirectX Exporter. You can see results here (I have included MeshViewer for .X files from dx9sdk august 2k5).

Paul-Jan · Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 12:44 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, that sounds really cool! Smile

Thanks for the example! Just one question: how can I see if there are multiple layers in that file? You didn't provide any texures (or at least, there are no separate texture files and the mesh viewer doesn't show any textures), and as the .X file is binary I can't really see for myself. Can I somehow get that information from the Mesh Viewer?

Daaark · Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 4:20 pm Post subject:

Baking in 3ds max was putting the results of x maps and operations onto 1 base texture. IE like in Deled, you could copy the texels of the triangles onto your lightmaps, then tint with the ambient light, then do the lighting operations on top. You have 1 baked texture layer.

-edit- holy typos

Paul-Jan · Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2005 7:40 pm Post subject:

Are you seriously telling me 3DS max does texture baking? I thought we stopped using that technique somewhere during the nineties as it costs enormous amounts of texture memory to get a decent texture resolution Very Happy