It’s been a long time, but I found myself interested in some dev sometimes. So I opened up the demo track I started and thought I’d finish it. But rather than that, I found that the 3ds max viewport was not representative of the game enough so I started to write a custom shader for it.

Here’s the 3ds max viewport on the left, and a game screenshot on the right:

Starting to get somewhere ! It already supports vertex color, vertex alpha, additive blending. The 2 things missing are the fog effect and the specular effect. Maybe on a next update 

This track is going to be very long, and there’s a lot of possible racelines ! So here comes the point of this post:

Would you be interested in making a raceline for the track ?

If YES:

just answer here or on the Re-Volt Live forum (link to the post), and I’ll send you the track AS IT IS, all you’ll have to do is add AI nodes and track zones…

I may also throw in some instances if you want to populate the terrain in your own way (trees, signs, etc…)

Also, if you can record ingame videos, I may ask you to try to follow the actual raceline and record your race. This is only to test and see if the raceline is clear enough as it is.

So here comes the screens !

Note that all of this is Work In Progress only !

There’s actually 4 modes available :

• spritesheet
• rotation
• panning & pan repeater
• flowing

Each mode have its own set of parameters, plus some common parameters. Here’s a short video to show some basic stuff : UVs Animator demo video

Download and install

>> UVs Animator download <<
Version 1.0
June 11 2017

To install unzip the file and drag and drop the mzp file in a 3ds max viewport. Installation routine is the same as the one used for TexTools (thanks to renderhjs for this !)

>> UVs Animator example file download <<
Here are some example to demonstrate what you can achieve. You need 3ds max 2010 (and after). If you have any problem opening the files, please leave a comment here.

How does it work ?

This tool adds an Unwrap_UVW modifier and animate UVs inside it. So only UVs are animated and nothing else (geometry/materials are untouched).

To deactivate the animation, just turn off/delete the modifier. Collapsing the modifier in the stack will also remove the animation.

CAUTION  Every animation is created on a per-vertex basis. It means that if you have a lot of UVs vertices the animation can take a while to be created ! Also the animation duration have to be taken into account. So animation creation time is dependant of : UVs vertices * Nb of frames

A good practice would be to weld every vertices before animating.

Basic usage

Select one Edit_Poly object and assign a material so you can see a texture. It should work with any material as long as UVs coordinates are taken into account.

When your Edit_Poly object is selected (1), open the UVs Animator UI (2).

For basic animations, that’s all you need.

The UVs Area

What’s important to remember is that every animation will be set inside the UVs Area.
The UVs Area is the small orange gizmo thing inside the UVW Unrwap modifier. Not the red faces or the vertices, but the orange gizmo surrounding everything else !

Now you’re ready to launch UVs Animator and play with the different settings !

Spritesheet

The spritesheet mode allow to create some spritesheet animation. You can specify the area where the animation lies on the texture (see advanced use).

Parameters :

• Rows : number of rows inside the UVs Area
• Columns : number of columns inside the UVs Area
• Skip last frames : if you have less frames in your animation than the max defined by Rows*Columns (the 4F on the left), you can choose to ignore them. The final length will be displayed on the left under the max length. This may be particularly useful if you want the animation to be played more than once
• Direction : here you can set how to read the atlas
• Fill mode : if you want your animation to be played more than once… Note that you can also copy-paste frames afterwards

You can define a 2nd frame on the timeline if you want to use a different UV shape than the one used to define the spritesheet area. Place the UVs on the first frame of the spritesheet, but on the 2nd of the timeline (please read this 2 times).
(see advanced use)

Note : you may get a fuzzy motion when playing. This is totally normal because 3ds max is interpolating vertex positions inbetween frames. (See advanced use)

Rotation

The rotation animation mode allow to create a rotating motion (like fans or wheels…). It will create one UV shape for each frame to match the animation duration.

If you ever tried to create rotating motion by hand this is how it would end up :

This happens because UVs interpolation works on a per-vertex basis so there’s no other choice than creating a key for each frame.

Parameters :

• Rotation Nb : how many rotations you want
• Parameters :
  • rotation direction : clockwise/counter clockwise (final result on geometry)
  • fit shape : untouched / inside UVs Area / outside UVs Area
  • keep aspect ratio : useful with stretched texture

You can define a 2nd frame on the timeline if you want to use a different UV shape than the one used to define the rotation area.
(see advanced use)

Pan

The panning mode may look like it’s useless since you already can achieve some panning motion using the default interpolation in 3ds max, but hey, i’m a lazy person and I like one-button magic ! 

Actually, it comes in very handy when used in combination with Additive Anim (see advanced use).

Parameters :

• Pan Horizontal : moving horizontally
• Pan Vertical : moving vertically
• Units : when using %, movement is relative to UVs Area size or texture size. When using px be sure to set the right texture size in the Safe Margin settings.
• Relative to UVs Area size : when using %, relative to UVs Area size or texture size.

If you want the animation to loop, pan with a multiple of 100% and it’s better to uncheck Relative to UVs Area size.

You can define a 2nd frame on the timeline if you want to use a different UV shape than the one used to define the panning area.
(see advanced use)

The repeater is a special animation mode. It is useful to keep your UVs within a certain range like when using clamp mode for UVs overflow or if you’re only using part of a texture.

Basic usage is like so : create a panning animation of 100% in each direction. Then, change the repeat values to something like 2 and 3 and apply. Open the Unwrap modifier created and have a look at the UVs while moving the time slider.

Parameters :

• Repeat Horizontal : how many times you want to repeat the panning animation horizontally
• Repeat Vertical : how many times you want to repeat the panning animation vertically

Note : you may get a fuzzy motion when playing. This is totally normal because 3ds max is interpolating vertex positions inbetween frames. (See advanced use)

Flowing

The flowing mode is a custom motion generator to simulate some wavy movement, like water surface. You can play with the different parameters to tweak the motion and create some cool effects. Each animation created will be different ! (unless you decide to lock the random seed )

Motion is created on a per-vertex basis, so to keep your UVs in one piece, you should weld all vertices.

Parameters :

• Tiling UVs : if possible, create a tiling pattern (using only quads and 1 UV shell will help)
• Keep UVs inside area : try to keep the UVs inside the UVs Area (setting reasonably small waves scale will help)
• Randomize shape : 0% is the user-defined shape, 100% will completely mess the UVs
• Primary motion and Secondary motion are working the same way
  • Wave scale : how much amplitude you want the wavy movement to be (relative to UVs Area size)
  • Cycles : how many waves you want during animation
  • Random speed : random speed for vertices
  • Desync verts : motion is created on a per-vertex basis and by default all waves are synchronized. Use this to desynchronize waves.
• Seed : this is the random seed used to generate motion. If the motion doesn’t fit your need, just ctrl+z (or delete the modifier) and Animate UVs again until the motion fits your liking. If you want to use the same seed each time, just lock it. You may also re-use the last one by clicking on the small arrows (or copy-paste).

Advanced use

Additive Animation

This is used if you want to mix multiple UVs animations. Just check Use additive anim to add an already created UVs animation to the one you’re about to add.

• Transform ref. in baseUVW

This means that instead of using the UVs Area of the last Animated UVW modifier, it will take the one defined in the last non-animated UVW modifier (Base UVW here)

Safe Margin

This will not change anything inside the texture or material. Enter your final image size for information only. Just enter a 100*100 image size if you wish to use percents for margin…

Note : If you’re using additive animation, you should apply the safe margin only on the last animation you will add.

Animation Range

By default, the animation is created to fill the timeline (may not be true for Spritesheet – see fill parameters). So if your timeline is set from 0 to 300, the animation will be 300 frames long (in 3ds 1st and last frame should be the “same” for looping mode), but you can choose to use a custom one. The Match range to custom button will simply set the timeline to the new animation range you’ve set.

Turbo Smooth

You may add a turbo smooth modifier on top of the animation. You can still use the additive mode !

Advanced examples

Removing the fuzzy motion

Spritesheet animation may display strange results when played in the viewport. To get the proper result, you just need to change the tangent type used : before animating by setting the default tangents to stepped, or after like so :

Select the object, open the curve editor and expand the Animated UVW modifier. Select all keys and set tangents to stepped. That’s all !

Defining custom UVs Area

Your texture may have multiple parts like this one :

There are 4 different explosion animations. Let’s say you want to get only the 2nd one, you need to unwrap from the whole texture to this part like this (try to be precise) :

Then add a spritesheet animation with 2 rows and 8 columns, playing horizontally from left to right and up to bottom and you’ll get this :

Defining a custom UV shape

The UVs Area is the surrounding rectangle of the UVs. But what if you want more control ? That’s possible.

You need a second frame in the Unwrap_UVW modifier. Turn autokey mode on (dont forget !! Even when modifying the first frame !!) and go to the 2nd frame of your animation. Then just edit the UVs, and turn autokey off when you’re done.

Here is an example for rotation mode :

Now if you try to animate the UVs, the UVs Area used is the one from the 1st frame, and the animated UV shape is the one from the 2nd frame :

And that’s it !   (note : flowing mode will ignore the 2nd frame since it’s quite useless with that mode)

Textures and examples can be downloaded from here : >> UVs Animator example file download <<

Here’s an excerpt of the current TODO list (random order) :

• Add support for multiple UVs shells – animate only selected
• If an Edit_Poly is added and geometry modified after UVs animation, the UVs animation should be transferable to a new Unwrap_UVW
• Add bounce loop mode for spritesheet
• Button to switch values in pan & repeater
• Motion types in tabs
• Animated UVs are detected using only names for now…
• Add presets for flowing
• Add progress bar if it takes too long
• Add cancel
• Existing animation may be shorter than the one you want to Add – repeat over timeline option
• Curves preview for flowing mode
• More efficient detection for tiling mode in flowing mode
• And more…

Feature request : feel free to ask !
Also, if you find any bug, just comment here or in the polycount thread.

I still have some work to do for the “apply SGs” function to work as expected on every type of object, and even on polygon selection, and even on instancied modifier polygon selection…

But I thought I would share what’s already done since it’s already a great helper !

Stay tuned for more !

Stay tuned !

Available soon ! Stay tuned !

At least one new feature should be available in the exporter after the track will be finished !
Meanwhile, enjoy the pics :

As I still love a game named Re-Volt, I still try to make cool things for it.
I have some new features coming for the Re-Volt Exporter, and a new track that I really want to finish !

So here’s a preview, and happy new year everyone !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Specifications

• Extreme Track
• 465m
• Review : no

Description

Get back to the Toy World !

Warning, hard track !

Small update of July 31, 2016 !
A little visibox glitch fixed, was mostly visible in reverse mode.

Download

The exporter is still in development and there can be remaining bugs. You can report these in the comments, or ask for new features !

Why another exporter ?

Using this you can directly edit and modify inside 3ds max, then all you have to do is click “export” to see the modifications inside ReVolt. Plus, there are a bunch of new features coming along such as:

• All collision properties available
• Collision flags (object only/camera only)
• Transparency gradients
• Envmap gradients
• Texture animations !!
• Quad surfaces optimisations
• And more !

And of course all the existing features are still available (Lighting using vertex colors, doublesided polygons…)

Download

>> ReVolt Exporter <<
Updated to Version 1.14
January 8 2018

Changelog :

1.14 – 8-January-18

• More useful Smoothing Group panel with surface properties
• Setting a material ID of 99 (or more) on a polygon will set the polygon to be untextured ingame
• Cleanup panel: the Search for “Zero edge” button will now select all the problematic vertices and all the problematic objects. You can also adjust the precision with the threshold value to fit your needs
• Cleanup panel: you can filter by Smoothing Group to apply angle threshold on quads, allowing to triangulate only double sided quads for example
• Fixed bug: in the texture animations properties, the final animation length was not always correct
• Fixed bug: the Search for “Zero edge” button now works on invisible edges too

1.13 – 5-February-17

• Added global scale multiplier !!
• New option for PRM export: shiny by default
• Env mapping is now defined in the same way for W and PRM
• New surface definition: SG27 now define a Semi-transparent type, unaffected by mirrors !
• Stats window now display file name and scale
• Fixed bug: texture animation wasn’t fully exported if active animation range was smaller than the defined one
• Fixed bug: PRM export using object pivot didn’t work properly !
• New “Adjust animation range” function in texture animation modifier + reviewed UI with more infos
• Removed custom SG flag 27: game crash when more than 1 car is on the surface !
• Pivot point is now centered on Edit_Meshes when exporting *.w files for more accurate bounding box
• Note: Global scale option in v1.12 Start Point helpers wont work. Replace by new ones !

1.12 – 24-January-17

• Added mirror support : *.rim files can be exported
• Added Start Point helper: useful to fill the *.inf file
• Added: exporting mirrors along with world files (one button process !)
• “Add Texture Animation” button selects last modified object
• “Add Mirror” button also selects last modified object
• Added help link

1.11 – 4-August-16

• Fixed bug: *.w export was no longer possible without using texture animation

1.10 – 29-June-16

• Modified the way texture animations are handled
• Added texture animation modifier
• Fixed bug for animation: coordinates were messed up
• Fixed bug for animation pick button

1.03 – 02-May-16

• Added functionnality “Reset pivot” for cleanup and convert functions
• Fixed a bug when an object had no texture channel

1.02 – 08-Apr-16

• Added statistics for export
  

1.01 – 06-Apr-16

• Unified export : PRM and W export should now work exactly the same
• Added “Keep quads” option for PRM export also to unify
• Default window size is now longer
• Added Backface culling display utilities
• Added Hidden edges display utilities
• Added bulk “Turn Edge” function to help with texture animation process

1.0 – 29-Mar-16

• First release

3ds max setup

To install (or update) just drag and drop the 3ds2rv.mzp file over a running instance of 3ds max and follow the instructions as shown in the following video:

By default you can no longer see both texture and vertex colors displayed in the 3ds max viewport but it’s possible by choosing any other display driver than “Nitrous”. Go inside the display driver configuration and change the driver, see video below:

F.A.Q., usage and known bugs

How to export

Select any object you want to export into ReVolt, open up the exporter panel, and click on the export button. You can choose to export an object (instance) as prm, or an entire scene (world) as w.
If you export large scenes/objects, the exporter may seems to hang (sometimes the progress bar freeze), just wait a few seconds and it should be fine.

Smoothing Groups conversion table

As with the ASE2RV tools, you can define surface properties using smoothing groups.

You can also convert any track that was meant to be exported using the ASE2RV tools by a simple click. Open the “Convert ASE2RV objects” panel and choose either the Morph or Ali table. That’s it, ready for export. Note that using Ali table conversion, if you made any shiny or transparent material, you’ll need to manually apply these settings on the objects. To do this, just select the faces and change the vertex alpha (=transparency) and illumination (=envmap color) values.

If anything goes wrong during export, delete the layer named “Re-Volt Export Layer”

When exporting the objects are cloned to apply necessary modifications and put on an new layer named ”Re-Volt Export Layer” (see layer manager)

This way, even if a bug occurs and you unintentionally save your scene, all you have to do to repair it is delete the layer named “Re-Volt Export Layer” along with every object it contains.

3ds scene setup: backface culling + edges only

Faces in Re-Volt are one-sided by default. If they are doublesided in the viewport activate the “backface culling” option. A good practice is to turn on the “backface cull on object creation” 3ds max’s option
(Customize->Preferences…->Viewports).

Lighting and vertex colors

To show vertex colors in the viewport you must disable Hardware Lighting and not use the Nitrous display driver.

How to keep “quad” faces (4 sided)

Just turn on the “Keep quads” option.

Sometimes 4-sided faces are divided into 2 triangles because they are not completely flat (coplanar). To force a 4-sided face to be exported as a quad, just make it “doublesided”. This is particularly useful when dealing with texture animations.

You may also change the maximum angle between 2 triangles threshold. Try to keep this value very very low, visual glitches may appear as you increase it.

You may force a triangulated export of any object by adding an “Edit Mesh” modifier.

Texture animation orientation

To change the animation orientation on a quad just turn the middle edge. Every time you turn the edge you turn the orientation by one quarter turn more.

Bug you may experience using “Keep quads” option: a face may have no collision

This is a bit tricky to explain, but to avoid any bug just add a middle edge when 2 edges on a 4-sided face are almost colinear (or more than 4-sided).

Note : the above example is exaggerated. For this bug to occur the 2 edges would have to be perfectly colinear, but better be safe than sorry.

You may also force a triangulated export of any object by adding an “Edit Mesh” modifier, wich will automatically solve any bug.

A good practice would be to add an extra middle edge on every non-convex face.

Zero edge bug.

Sometimes after export unexplained visual bugs appears (distorted envmap, invisible collision wall…) that may be caused by edges that have a length of zero. To solve the problem select the objects to export and click “Search for “Zero edge !”. If any zero edge is found the object in question will be automatically selected. Select all vertices and use a “weld” with a very low value !

You may try to see where the problem lies by looking at the object from “behind”.

Statistics

You can have a preview of what’s exported using the “Stats” option.

Here’s a list of currently known limits (Thanks to Huki for these infos) :

• 16383 solid polygons ( = polyhedrons) (65535 since RV1.2)
• 1400 transparent polygons visible at the same time (note that “additive” polygons are taken into account)
• 4000 envmapped polygons visible at the same time
• 16 texture animations (no limit since RV1.2 – Alpha 12.0405)