Hi, there!

In two words: great engine!

As is the usual procedure, I am experimenting with the engine, i.e. trying to see how the (not very humbly put) engine features are to be implemented by the programmer/artist. As it happens, the programming part is more straight forward than I firstly expected. What's more, up to this point the lack of complete documentation is not much of an issue either. However, the creative tools, i.e. modeller/world editor, need some more explanation.

Most recently, I've been fiddling with cloth. I hope I am wrong, but it looks like cloth can not be simulated directly in the model editor, but in the final executable, which at some point is a bit tedious (especially when experimentation is needed). I couldn't understand the purpose of the operation, named "Cloth Edit Mode" in "vertex face" view. Unless I am very much mistaken, it seems it's there to provide the advantage of adding cloth to a compound mesh inside the editor, but as I say I don't very well understand how this functionality works and therefore I'd be very glad if anyone could say something enlightening on the matter.

Secondly, I am praying for an opinion as to how to implement certain rendering features. In order to acquaint myself a bit better with the framework and for my personal interests I am trying to make a mathematically simple simulation of the blood flow, which includes rendering of red-blood cells. It happens, however, that I am not achieving satisfactory results with the visuals. For reference I am sending two pictures of my (very humble and purely self-educational) implementation, along with two photos of some real cells.

Achieved:

As one can judge by the photos, I am some way from obtaining good results. It looks like real cells are a bit more hollow in the centre, and achieve much more intensive subsurface scattering. I would be very happy if anyone could advise me as to how to attain more realistic-looking cells.

Thank you very much!

hello and welcome to the forum,

yes cloth can't be simulated in Mesh Editor, in the editor you just select which vertexes should be simulated physically, and which by just simple animation skinning (they will be constantly attached to the bones)

as for rendering, maybe you should increase ambient lighting D.ambPower
and play around more with material parameters in the Mesh Editor, there is some "fake sub surface scattering" there
you can also create your custom shaders but that requires purchasing a license.

Good luck!

(01-06-2010 11:08 PM)Esenthel Wrote:  hello and welcome to the forum,

yes cloth can't be simulated in Mesh Editor, in the editor you just select which vertexes should be simulated physically, and which by just simple animation skinning (they will be constantly attached to the bones)

as for rendering, maybe you should increase ambient lighting D.ambPower
and play around more with material parameters in the Mesh Editor, there is some "fake sub surface scattering" there
you can also create your custom shaders but that requires purchasing a license.

Good luck!

Dear me, even my mother couldn't have answered that fast, Mr. Slazinski (on more prosaic topics of course).

Well, regarding the cell-simulation, I should say I did the same, but I was wondering whether there was some artistic cheat instead of writing shaders as very unfortunately I couldn't really engage myself with a license at the moment. But, I am still very thankful for the opinion.

However I still did not understand the first part. Do you mean that the "Cloth Edit Mode" setting concerns animation rather than simulation? I just wonder how one could set up a character, featuring cloth simulation without having to attach the cloth in the source code but in the (right place for it, i.e.) mesh editor tool. I'd be glad for a more detailed explanation or at least a direction.

Thank you again and good night!

Hi,

first you need to make sure that the cloth model is in the right place in the Mesh Editor, so when you load the character model (as background mesh)
the cloth looks like its already on the character
then you select in the cloth edit mode, which cloth vertexes should be permanently attached to the character.