+30 = 240 €

you guys should explain exactely what and how you plan to work with this plugin, and what external tools you plan to use.
show an example of what could be done with a second uvmap, then more people would probably join paying for this.
but for the average noob it is not clear what one could do with this.

make it clear for everyone please.

I would also contribute something towards the production of this tool. Lightmaps on non-BSP entities are my dream come true.

Though is this necessary with the new ABT tree scene manager system and arbitrary level geometry? I am still not entirely clear on what the difference would be.

I guess perhaps if the MDL's are dynamic entities that move around, though then the lightmapping would not really change with the movement??

i thought some more about it...

loading the uvs from an asc file probably wouldn't work that well. it would be better and easier to create a simple custom format which supports two uv-sets and contains the whole mesh in the way direct3d needs it. the 3dgs plugin could be quite simple then since it only would have to replace the mesh of an entity. the majority of the work could be handled by a blender (for example) export script then.

Quote:

---

Though is this necessary with the new ABT tree scene manager system and arbitrary level geometry? I am still not entirely clear on what the difference would be.

I guess perhaps if the MDL's are dynamic entities that move around, though then the lightmapping would not really change with the movement??

---

i think such a plugin still could be useful then. for example you can't use lod with level geometry. so maybe models which can have light maps would make it possible to build bigger levels since you could use a kind of "chunked lod".

Here is an explanation:

The goal is something like that (or more complicated):


I made this scene only with models and rendered the light and shadows in Lightwave. After that I created a fixed function effect (some kind of a shader) to blend the shadows with the color textures.

You can find the 3dgs-scene here:
http://www.firma-geppert.de/Gamedev/Images/shadowmap.zip

But this is complicated. Every object needs an specific material and you cannot tile textures.

The goal of the second uv-set is:
1) you can use the first texture with texture-tiling. So you can use a wood-texture for the chairs and you can map the top and bottom sides of the seat-plate to the same texture space. You can create very detailled color uv-mapping.

2) the shadow map gets another uv-map. Here is no tiling / no repetitions. So it can contain the shadows for every surface of the object. It has not a very high resolution but that is okay for shadows.

I hope this makes it a bit more clear.

Export two Models from your Modeler. The first Model with the uv-map you need for the colormap. The second model with the uv-map you need for the lightmap.

Open the second model in MED. In the Skineditor go to Export->SkinMapping. Then you have your second uv-map available in a text-file.

What you need? The posibility to import this text-file as second uvmap in the first model.

Franks explanation of the goal of this hole thing is very good!
This plugin would make things a lot easier!

Here is another example how the plugin will be used or what it can do:


the light-mapped scene in the second screenshot is achieved by creating a second model with the lightmap UV coordinates and the lightmap texture, placing it in the excact location of the texture model and using a shader to blend both models together... it is awfully complicated and any game programmer will kill you the for doing this in the same way this method kills the performance!

With the plugin it will simply be: one model with 2 uv maps + texture + light map.

concerning the approach of actually saving the second UV map my idea is the same as Wichts:
You have a second copy of the model imported to MED which uses the Lightmap-UVs and you use the export function to export the UV coords to a file! now you can use the plugin to append this second set of UV coordinates to the first model.

I think ventilators idea is not that bad!
The models with lightmaps would most likely be used to replace level geometry, therefore the models won't need to have animations or bones! A own model format therefore only has to include mesh and UV coordinates, skins can be loaded from external sources!

I would make it an even 250 Euros!
Ventilator, willing to give it a try?

direct3d meshes don't work like the mdl7 format. the reason the mesh gets affected is because uvs get stored with a vertex in the vertex struct and not separately. in a modeling program a vertex can have several different uvs if it is at an uv-seam. in the direct3d vertex buffer such vertices have to be stored multiple times so that each uv is there. this duplication will affect the triangle indices of course.

so you have to write an algorithm which finds out which vertices have to be duplicated and then generate the proper vertex and triangle lists. if i did this in python like i talked about in my previous post this wouldn't be the hard part anymore.

now the hard part for me is all the direct3d buffer stuff since i have no experience with that and i find it a bit confusing. i will try to experiment a little in the next days.

...

the mdl7 format doesn't support a second uv-set.