My Rural ruins have a number of very serious shadowing problems...to fix these, I'd have to detach and edit a ton of faces..as such, the shadows haven't been fixed..
I've heard that some builders use unrendered geometry to simulate the shadows of walls..I'm wondering if this might not be the best approach for me.
Second regarding walkmesh..since I build my models from one piece of mesh, some times the walkmesh is more complicated than neccessary I think..
Should my walkmesh have a top..like the top of the wall..it would save alot of polys if I removed it..I can't see how this would impact game play..except that you wouldn't be able to place object on top of the walls...
Or should I remake the walkmeshes and simplify them a good deal..
Your comments and suggestions welcome..
Two questions....
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Chandigar
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Shadows:
As is mentioned in one of the tutorials here, one way you can fix the shadow problem is to just remove all the smoothing groups from the mesh. If it doesn't have any smoothing groups, the shadows will work fine. This will make everything look faceted, but if its an architectural element that might not be an issue.
Walkmeshes:
Two things about walkmeshes.
1. You can consider walkmeshes to basically be viewed from above by the engine. This means that you should be able to see the fronts of all the polys on the walkmesh from above.
ie If you have a vertical surface thats non walkable, the engine may not see it and you'll have the walking on air problem. Hence the tutorials generally tell you to taper stuff off... which also means that if you have complicated meshes that overlap on themselves, you shouldn't use it directly as a walkmesh.
2. Because it views everything from above, its supposedly highly recommended that every part of the tile have walkmesh info on it or it'll mess up the pathfinding. I had a few tiles with partial walkmeshes and they seemed to work fine, but better safe than sorry. Personally, I just take my terrain mesh and tweak and extrude it to account for buildings etc... but then mine are separate meshes.
PS: There is no guarantee that the preceding information is 100% correct or just secondhand Aurora Toolset Voodoo. Caveat emptor!
As is mentioned in one of the tutorials here, one way you can fix the shadow problem is to just remove all the smoothing groups from the mesh. If it doesn't have any smoothing groups, the shadows will work fine. This will make everything look faceted, but if its an architectural element that might not be an issue.
Walkmeshes:
Two things about walkmeshes.
1. You can consider walkmeshes to basically be viewed from above by the engine. This means that you should be able to see the fronts of all the polys on the walkmesh from above.
ie If you have a vertical surface thats non walkable, the engine may not see it and you'll have the walking on air problem. Hence the tutorials generally tell you to taper stuff off... which also means that if you have complicated meshes that overlap on themselves, you shouldn't use it directly as a walkmesh.
2. Because it views everything from above, its supposedly highly recommended that every part of the tile have walkmesh info on it or it'll mess up the pathfinding. I had a few tiles with partial walkmeshes and they seemed to work fine, but better safe than sorry. Personally, I just take my terrain mesh and tweak and extrude it to account for buildings etc... but then mine are separate meshes.
PS: There is no guarantee that the preceding information is 100% correct or just secondhand Aurora Toolset Voodoo. Caveat emptor!
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I have smoothing groups applied to most of the wall meshes...to give it a rounded, worn appearance..so I'd like to keep them..
As to the walkmesh...should I weld the vertices from the top of the wall together in order to form a triangle? this would cut way down on poly's and still give me the same net result as far as the walkable area is concerned...
As to the walkmesh...should I weld the vertices from the top of the wall together in order to form a triangle? this would cut way down on poly's and still give me the same net result as far as the walkable area is concerned...