Comments on: Re-Volt Tut’ – some news !

By: truskj911

truskj911 — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 13:57:05 +0000

haha, yeah I have drawing tablet and do a bit of graphic design, I can just be OCD at times, so having the layout and palette set for me in advance allowed me to just stream roll through that track, it only took around 2-3 weeks to make lol.
hey earlier I tried what you suggested about setting up a water plane, I selected my whole scene and used a slice modifier. I didnt have to worry about duplicating anything or setting collision properties, just a quick slice I’ll do now before export each time, that way I’ll have a non destructive work flow. it seems to work. there is still just a post or two that has the polygon wobble, but for the most part it worked fine, now lots of splashing for everyone! lol

have you tried the track yet? and when are you going to link me your track you want me to test? :p

By: TweaK

TweaK — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 13:12:05 +0000

Don’t worry I only work on it when I have time and motivation, but seeing someone interested is of great help to find motivation !
I think I did something wrong with UV coordinates for texture animation, hopefully this will be fixed in the next release with a bunch of bugs I found ^^

If you want some advice about choosing color scheme etc : draw ! You may try to blockout the level, and test, and make overpaints (very quickly, no need for pieces of art yet !). Doing this will allow you to refine very easily.
Working with very basic shapes and no texture helps (a bit of vertex colors to help visualise the terrain).

I wrote something like this in the -unfinished- tutorial I was working on, with pics etc… I’m actually cutting it in small parts to finally make it available

By: Truskj

Truskj — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 02:50:25 +0000

hey hey! thanks for your advice on the forum.
lol don’t stress about the swirls, if the software can’t do it, then I can live without it, I’ve already been planning on how to use single poly texture animations for my next track.
speaking of, I hope I won’t disappoint, but I don’t think anyone should expect the same level of detail from my future tracks, I put my heart in to that recent one, and I missed out on a lot of sleep trying to fit it in between work and personal life. the next one will be much simpler (although I’ll do my best to make sure its got the same quality).

I do have another track too, which is just a blueprint for now, completely original.. but It will be a while before I can get started on that one. plus it will be much harder, with “Midsea Island”, the layout and colour palette were both taken from the Super nes game, so it made a lot of the decision making easier. my original track might really slow me down when it comes to choosing colour schemes, etc.

I hope everyone enjoys the track! I know I do, everytime I test a change I made, I can’t help but race 3 laps.

By: TweaK

TweaK — Sun, 12 Jun 2016 16:14:30 +0000

I checked the WIP thread, thank you for the nice words

Ok I understand what you wanted to achieve. I’d really love to see these wind swirls !

I’ll try to make this easy to do next time I work on the exporter, but this is quite some work

I cant wait if you make some more tracks of this quality !

By: Truskj

Truskj — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 07:16:53 +0000

haha, oh my… to have my first track called “art”
I’m flattered…
I just joined up to RV-Live, under the name DC.All, I have a WIP which I just started, and I’m quite happy with the feedback. you can message me on that, if you are a member.
I’ll give your new track a look, I’ll admit I’ve already played your older ones :)

the texture animation were going to be for some stylized wind swirls, kind like from Zelda: Wind Waker, I built them with polys and then did the UV’s so I only have to pan a gradient across the UV space and a lovely, varying swirl runs across the sky. it works in max and stuff but if failed in RV, but that’s ok, it was more of a test after all.

I don’t think I’ll animate the water, plus I’m using the entire ocean, and some parts of the mud as a single Poly’d texture, this way, I can add all sorts of shading and variation for depth or shadows in photoshop.
I had originally made tileable textures for the water/mud areas, but there were just too many poly’s and it looked so bland, having it all on a single poly with a 2k bitmap just seems to do the job much better.

By: TweaK

TweaK — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 09:59:57 +0000

Ow yeaaah !! This looks amazing !!! I just can’t wait to race it ^^
I have one track almost finished too, maybe we could beta-test each other ?

Anyway, it seems texture animation would fit well for the water surface ! If you wish to talk about it more directly I’d be glad to help.
Maybe on RVHouse or Skype or whatever you like…?

Now about the “custom smoothing group”, this is because Re-Volt built-in surfaces are not all available using the default SG set. So I added one if you wish to use one of the extra surface. These are surfaces with ID 1,22,23,26 and 27 so nothing really fancy, but the last one is quite amazing though : it have no grip at all ! I found it quite fun to use ^^
Sorry I didn’t complete the smoothing group table about it.
This smoothing group is also great for test purpose, i.e. if you set a lot of surfaces using SG23, you can change the surface property when exporting without modifying the geometry.

Thank you so much for making great art using my exporter

By: Truskj

Truskj — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 02:54:36 +0000

ahhhh, I see.
lol well I think I will forget about the animated textures then, it was supposed to be a quick effect which I wasn’t too sure about anyway.
the track is almost finished!

thanks for all your help, and also I noticed there was something about custom smoothing group properties? would that mean I can define things like grip/bumpy properties? or am I way off again. lol

By: TweaK

TweaK — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 16:39:42 +0000

I see what you had in mind
In fact, this is technically possible and I’d like to do that too.
Understand that this would mean storing an animation for each polygon. Since the original game only support 16 animations, it was quite useless to make the exporter handle texture animation that way. I know the 1.2 version of the game does handle more animations, but I’m afraid about the overhead too much animations could result in. Maybe some day I’ll experiment about this

You could split you mesh in separate polygons and then export each animations to achieve this for now. If I work on the feature I was talking about in my previous message, you will be able to export as many as you want.

Note that keeping quads is a good idea for texture animations. You can force any quad to be exported by making it double-sided.

By: Truskj

Truskj — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 02:20:14 +0000

Hey, thanks for the help!
I got some texture animations happening, although not in the way I expected. I was hoping I could pan a texture across a whole mesh with its UV in place, however when applying an animation to a model, it seems to revert the UV to single faced mapping, which I guess makes sence, would be great to use on water or other things, but not what I had in mind.
do you know of any way to animate a texture on a model while keeping the models original UV intact? or another work around would be to get the animation from the mesh itself, not just a 4 sided plane. well I guess this is just how the revolt engine does things, so probably, it can’t be helped.
another limitation of the Revolt engine is no repeating textures, it’d be great if they could fix that, got plenty of tracks which could be ripped straight from other video games which I’d love to put in Revolt, haha.

By: TweaK

TweaK — Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:56:51 +0000

Thank you, I’ll have a look about the WSM modifiers and see if I can do something.

About the normals, there’s room for improvement but the exporter was mainly designed for world export so there was no huge need for subtle adjustments. If you want more control, I have a feature I want to add but it’s not my top priority.
The idea is as follows : surface properties are applied using smoothing groups, and since it affect normals, if more control is desired you may add another modifier to control normals only.
I understand it can be useful for cars, so tell me if you want something like this !
In the meantime, you still can control more precisely by breaking/welding vertices.

I have some ideas to simplify a lot the texture animation process too so if you wish to wait a little longer I may try something ^^

I wont do any tutorial here as I wish to improve the documentation (thanks to your feedback)
But here you go, quickly :

- animation must be applied on an Edit_Poly object
- the object must be a 3 or 4 sided plane
- then you can do whatever you want with UVs (again I don’t know about WSM modifiers)

If there’s at least 2 different frames an animation will be exported.
You need to select the Edit_Poly object using the “Pick Anim” button and adjust settings (FPS and Animation Range).
Texture animation on any mesh can be changed using the texture ID.
It’s a bit tricky, so I hope this helps !