Track poly count limit

[Skubidou]

Other idea.... that would need more than 100.000 polygons, is an idea asked by Hal when we though about a pod2...

You run 1 laps on each track, but you run the entire track (or almost), and the transition between each track is made by a vortex... So you need to put all tracks in one BL4, adding the vortex... I think 100.000 is a minimum

This is the final run to the spacecraft.....

Skubidou:~

[Vortex]

Hell ya you're going need more than 100.000 polys if you want to stick ME into that track ;-) I'll take up least 500.000. Woohoo, Vortex pretending to be a Vortex.

Umm....

[Leadbest]

Thats a helluva good idea, but you could use railguns instead of vortexs. Done right, they work really well. I think you would get the same effect if you twisted the polygons to make the car do a barrel roll. hmmm.... you could just texture the exteriour of the tunnel to make it look like you were twisting.

About my pic, it is just green for the map. LOL I didnt use slime anywhere because I hate that crap. Its hard enough to do three laps below two minutes.

Reverse is very much different from forward, look carefully you will see.

I found out the hard way you cant divide a quad polygon, or all its parts wont render. I was pulling my hair out for two days trying to find the missing polygons, and they were still there in 3dsmax. When I divided into sectors, I split some of them and they didnt like that. Sometimes all I had to do was turn an edge and it would reappear in Pod, very strange.

I dont know if this is a bug with the exporter plugin, or a bug with Pod.

If I didnt use the Quadrilateral Optimization, everything showed up fine but framerate was lower, so I finally fixed all the quads. Took me 2 days to figure out where they all were.

In short, this was a lot more work than I thought it would be LOL.

This was me and my wife when she found out what I was doing yesterday...

[Skubidou]

This is a LB bug

I don't know how the Sik plugin works, but i imagine he doesn't have 'lost' time to make 'human errors checking' If the triangle the plugin found has an invisible edge, it assume that it has to create a quad, so it creates a quad in the BL4, and if it doesn't find the 4th corner, it let the initialising value (0, or unknown) and write it in the BL4

Pod, if you describe a quad, it will use a quad, and if the fourth corner is set at 0.0.0 when the reste of the corners are somewhere at 500,500,0, there are no bugs for him, but the pod engine has the bug that if a face is to width, it doesn't texture it (the texture is to small to apply a pixel to each 'pixel' of the face), and he also has bug with collisions tests and grip.

In conclusion, Sik plugin and Pod engine does support LB Bugs, but don't correct them This can be view as a problem here, but using such 'bugs' can also be usefull sometime, like the normal we can modify, the visibility list, ....

Since 1997, didn't your wife understood that you love POD better than her?

Skubidou:~

[Siklist]

I found out the hard way you cant divide a quad polygon, or all its parts wont render

I don't fully understand what you mean by dividing a quad polygon but I think your problem came from non planar polygons.
A quad polygon is made of 2 triangles sharing an edge (this edge is then invisible). The plugin simply assume that your quad is correct, i.e the 4 vertices are in the same plane. In case they aren't, the 2 inner triangles of this quad will have different normals and then the poly won't render correctly in pod. To avoid this in 3dsmax, bad quad polygons (non planar) have to be split in 2 triangles by turning visible the shared edge.

[Skubidou]

I think he says that when dividing sectors (different from the original one), he has 'break' some quad : one triangle is in a sector, and the other triangle of the quad is in another sector, so the trinagles are not attached anymore, but the invisble edge is still there, so when you create the BL4, as you progress sector by sector (object by object), you have, in the first sector, a triangle with an invisble edge, but without a 4th corner..., and the same in the other sector...

Another possible bug is that in pod engine, the quad use only one normal, which is the one of the first triangle (and not a mix of the 2 normals of the 2 triangles). I have extracted triangles, put the invisble edge, but let Max create a normal for each triangle. Original tracks use sometime quads that are not coplanar. If Sik plugin find the second triangle first, it create a quad, but use the normal of the first triangle found (that should be 'second' triangle in the original track), so in the new BL4, you have the same polygon as in the original track, but not the same normal, so texturing, collision, ... could be different.

Example:
Original BL4: Quad1, composed of triangle A and B. The normal of the quad is A', the normal of the triangle A
Max: Quad1, compose of triangle A and B, each triangle has its own normal A' and B'
If the plugin finds triangle B before finding triangle A, it assume that the triangle B is the first triangle of the quad.
New BL4: Quad1, composed of triangle B and A (but it give the same result as A-B for the shape of the quad), but it use normal B' and visibility angles, ... is calculate with B' insteed of A', so you could have a different result in Pod...

Skubidou:~

[Siklist]

I think he says that when dividing sectors (different from the original one), he has 'break' some quad : one triangle is in a sector, and the other triangle of the quad is in another sector, so the trinagles are not attached anymore, but the invisble edge is still there

No, the plugin throws an error if an open edge (invisible edge not shared by 2 or more faces) exists.

[Skubidou]

invisible edge not shared by 2 or more faces

What do you do if the invisble edge is shared by 3 or more faces???

Skubidou:~

[Siklist]

Depends whether the "quadrilaterals optimization" option is checked.
If it is, plugin throws another error. If not no problem cause all is exported as triangles.

Or maybe it throws an error in both cases. Can't remember.

[Leadbest]

I didnt know that quads shared an invisible edge. All this time and I did not really know what a quadrilateral polygon was. LOL

I did have "quadrilateral optimization" checked, and some polygons would not transfer to the BL4. They were not invisible, they were just not there I could drive right through them. The exporter did not give any errors.

When I unchecked QO, all polygons transferred to the BL4. Thats how I found it was a problem with quads.

So when I started to fix the broken quads, I either turned the invisible edge, or reattached the two halves if they were separated when I broke the track into sectors.

There were even a couple of polygons that wouldnt transfer that I had not broken. One wall in sewer had just one triangle missing in the middle of a sector. When I turned the edge, the triangle reappeared. The same thing happened to one triangle in the West section.

I guess when you turn an edge, it must make it visible? So many things I still dont understand...

Anyway, i think Im done with it. If anyone finds a CP bug, I will change it LOL.

[LPH]

There were even a couple of polygons that wouldnt transfer that I had not broken. One wall in sewer had just one triangle missing in the middle of a sector. When I turned the edge, the triangle reappeared. The same thing happened to one triangle in the West section.

I guess when you turn an edge, it must make it visible? So many things I still dont understand...

'Turned the edge' is same as change the normal?

[Leadbest]

No. This is what I mean.

---
|\|
--- This is a quad. The red \ is the invisible edge.

---
|/|
--- This invisible edge was turned in "Edit Edge" mode.

[Skubidou]

In French (dans le texte )

Un Quadrilatère est composé dans Max de 2 triangles adjacents. Le côté commun est la diagonale, qui va en principe du 1er au 3e coin du quadrilataire. C'est selon cette diagonale que sera plié le quadrilataire s'il n'est pas parfaitement coplanaire. Ce qu'il a fait, c'est changer de diagonale pour composer les 2 triangles qui forment le quadrilataire.

Cette modification a des implications dans Pod, puisque seul la normale du premier triangle est utilisée pour tout le quadrilataire. Donc si tu 'tourne' la diagonale, le premier triangle change d'angle, donc la normale aussi, et dans Pod, la normal sert pour savoir si un polygone doit être affiché ou non (si tu te trouve en dessous du plan donné par la normale, elle n'apparait pas).

Si un quadrilataire n'est vraiment pas coplanaire (imagine qu'il y a un angle de 90° entre les 2), quand tu arrives face au premier triangle, tu es au dessus du plan de la normale, donc les 2 triangles s'affichent. Par contre, si tu arrive face au triangle 2, tu te trouve sous le plan du triangle 1, donc aucun triangle ne s'affiche, même pas le 2e.

Skubidou:~