Wall Worm Forums

The beta for WW Displacements is now available at http://wallworm.com/projects/utilities/wallworm_displacement_tool.html

Please share feedback. And remember it's in beta.

The tool is now at a stage where it can create ground terrain well. My current dilemma is outputting multi-sided displacement brushes... which I haven't been able to figure out.

But it's now at a point that can be used for landscaping (planar displacements as in the video). Email me if you want to test this incomplete beta out and provide feedback.

Quote from: deathdingo on March 25, 2011, 06:32:44 AM
I think you mean Agent of Chaos levels

Ouch! That was below the belt!

I have the viewport textring figured out now. I think I'll have a beta for testing by Monday or Tuesday.

Now it all makes sense! I finally understand you Matt... Horatio Pump can be abbreviated as HP... Aside from sharing the first two initials of H. P. Lovecraft... (which was my original guess for the name), I finally realized the truth after reading your fantastic account! It's HP as in Honey Possum!

Here is a preview of the Wall Worm Displacement Tool:

That's impossible! Your credibility just dropped to Lippy levels...

So I now have a working interface for the displacement tool. It's pretty nifty... but I'm not yet ready to give out the beta. Maybe next week.

I've got the functions to make displacements and the alpha blends almost complete now. Hopefully I can have a UI next week. It's pretty awesome. Armed with Convexity and Wall Worm tools, 99% of the design process for Source will be possible inside 3ds Max soon. The only exception I foresee is entity scripting (inputs and outputs of entities)... but that isn't so much a design aspect as a logic aspect; I'm fine leaving that in Source.

Version 0.2 (2011-03-15)

• Fixed default gamma to be set to the value of the Gamma spinner. Previously, the gamma was incorrectly set to 2.2 unless you had changed the value of the gamma spinner.
• Added half-sized (horizontal 2:1) images to file output list. Can be manually swapped out with current 1:1 images by renaming and running compile. Named same as corresponding side but suffixed with "_half".
• Added 4x4 pixel copy of Down image that can be used for the down image by swapping/renaming to the down texture name and recompiling. Named same as the down image but suffixed with "_tiny".

The second two items will eventually be integrated into the Sky Writer UI with the currently disabled buttons for 1/2 and Tiny. To use right now, you can rename the current images for these to something else and then remove the "_half" and "_tiny" from the sides and/or bottom alternative images--then recompile.  If you don't understand the purpose... forgive me... I'll add more docs on how to do this later as well as why you may want to do this.

So I started adding Phong to the texture exporter. Since this is my first delve into it... tell me what you think of this:

In Max, if the Material Shader is set to Phong and there is a bitmap in the Specular Level Map slot, the material will have Phong added and use the Specular Level bitmap as the $phongexponenttexture texture?

That is currently what I've got it doing.

I've thought of making it check to see if there is a bump/normal map that has an alpha channel...in order to be used also. Is that necessary or not?

Finally, what parameters in the 3ds Material for a phong material might control/translate the other parameters?:

$phongexponent
$phongboost 
$phongfresnelranges

In other words, what would make most sense? It's just way easier to translate from the material than build an extra utility to control those. It may be that those values will have to be tweaked in the VMT file after generated if I can't find a good controller in the Max material.

WWMT is nearing the end of Beta. I've been testing Wunderboy's new SMD Exporter which will be available soon. When that is out, I'll release WWMT 1.0. Things to expect:

A couple new controls in the settings floater and an update to adding WWMT to the menu that is compatible with Sky Writer (right now, if you install the Sky Writer menu then try to install WWMT, it will fail).

With the new update you will be able to use CAT for your rigs! (Until now you couldn't because the CAT rigs would export as geometry instead of just bones). That problem is resolved with the new Wunderboy exporter!

The ability to use CAT is something I have mixed feelings about. I really love CAT (in theory) except that I've had a lot of problems with the CATMotion panel freezing Max. Some of my feelings (shared by others) is documented in this Short Story About CAT.

Anyway, I'll be testing more over the next couple of weeks. The release should be sometime soon.

Hopefully Max 2012 (coming out in a few weeks) will resolve this problem. The flexibility and simplicity of CAT makes it an ideal tool for making animations.

Are you getting along now?

Something that I've wanted for a long time is a tool to create displacements for Source inside 3ds Max. I've now officially started this project.

There are going to be two separate tools:

• Simple Displacement Tool
• Advanced Displacement Tool

I will release the Simple Displacement tool first. As the name suggests, it won't be too complex.

The advanced tool will be more complex; depending on how it goes, I hope to have this tool ready later in 2011 and it may potentially be integrated with Convexity. Don't worry, by the time I release this, there will probably be a free version of Convexity out for those of you leery about purchasing a plugin. Still... I strongly encourage all of you who use my tools to look at Convexity--it is one of my favorite plugins. I personally want more people to support Convexity so that its developer is encouraged to keep developing it!

Thanks for the idea. I'll have to learn more about the Source phong shader since I haven't used it yet. But I'll look into it.