Sample Resources Improvement

[Brocan]

It would be great if someone could make a high detailed character where advanced shaders would be shown: normal, specular... (even sss)

I'll try to do myself, but my art in 3d modelling is really really bad

[jonim8or]

It would also make the demos more consistent if there would be several artifacts for the same kind of scene. tudorhouse and sinbad can fit in one scene (aesthetically speaking), and razor and robot belong in a totally different scene. I'd think we would have three main categories:
fantasy/medieval
Science Fiction
cartoon

On a side note, I've been thinking that it would be really cool to have a all-in-one demo showcasing the best features Ogre has to offer.

I've been thinking about the same thing.I hope to start on some fantasy/medieval building soon (for personal excercise), and if I do, I'll add specular and normal maps and donate it.

[Zonder]

I do think maybe having a tech demos would be nice.

If doing a medival scene for instance I would recommened forgetting what we have models wise but come up with a scene and list of models needed. Then people know what to donate if they have time too. The demo could be created and all missing models can be replaces with a "?" place holder model which an artist could replace to test their own.

Of couse this scene should also have a list a ogre features it should be showing off before designing it. Terrain paging, sky box, water effects, shadows etc...

[Kojack]

I was just trying something unrelated to this which used the sinbad mesh, and I noticed a slight problem with the rescaled and rotated mesh. Here's sinbad's dance animation:

[youtube]X_RBubYdO6E[/youtube]


It seems meshmagick has a bit of a problem with scaling skeletons. I haven't tried the other scaled meshes yet, this one was too funny.

[Mind Calamity]

Haha, that's quite a funny problem

Here's my try on scaling and upgrading the Sinbad model:

[youtube]uYOdmR2j8tQ[/youtube]

I updated the blend file to Blender 2.6x.

Also I screwed up the run animation a bit, so he looks like he's walking, rather than running.

Sinbad is now about 2m tall 1.98-2.10 in some animations.

Update: Fixed the run animation, will upload in a [s]few minutes (or within 1 hour, depending on how it goes).[/s]

Update #2: It's amazing how long it took me to finish this...
Here he is: http://www.mediafire.com/?218glx4pucn4p6y

[Kojack]

I just tried re-modifying the sinbad mesh with meshmagick. Same source mesh, same transform line (it was in a batch file), same meshmagick executable. This time he dances correctly.

I think when I was first doing the scaling stuff, I kept applying different scales and stuff to test, and each time I restored the .mesh file, but I forgot to restore the .skeleton file.
So the skeleton has more transforms applied than the mesh.


I've been attempting to convert Sintel (from the blender made Sintel movie) into an ogre mesh. She's a highly detailed character which fits our medieval theme, and is creative commons licensed. But she's also 171000+ triangles (and that's after I removed a bunch of armour and stuff) and really not modelled for games. Plus her hair doesn't look as good in ogre as in a full render by blender.
The rigging process is crazy, I really don't understand enough (or any) blender to do much with her. I had to delete it all to get her exported.


The sintel game has a differently setup model which could be easier to use, but I don't know what the license is on it (the original was cc attrib, not sharealike).

[jonim8or]

Cool idea of exporting Sintel. The license, CC-By is perfect. BTW did you use the original sintel, or the Sintel Lite? I think sintel lite is meant to be more fit for games.

Ive brainstorming a bit about the "medieval demo". I'd suggest something like a small town, with several houses, a church/cathedral and a bit luxorious house. In the town square there's a statue of sinbad (maybe the one we gave to sinbad?). The demo is supposed to incorporate the fresnel, terrain, shadows, dynamic grass, smoke, skybox, deferred shading, particle effects, character animation demos.

out.jpg

A sketch of the Sinbad statue in the town center

out3.jpg

And some concept art for other buildings.

out2.jpg

I am thinking about how we should approach this "asset donating", and the asset organization as a whole. I think it would be good to have a repo somewhere for the "source files" (blender, gimp, photoshop), and to only place the exported files in the Ogre source tree. would that be a totally separate repository, or is there one already that we could use?
Also, some of the textures are for "general use" (like pebbles), some are specifically for a single mesh. I think we should also have that separated. I would imagine a folder ordering like the following:

Code: Select all

meshes/
    sinbad/
        sinbad.mesh
        sinbad.skeleton
        texture1.png
        sinbad.material
        license.txt
    tudorhouse/
        house.mesh
        house.material
        walls.png
    ...
materials/
    stonewall/
        stones.png
        stones_bump.png
        stones.material
    ...

But the problem with it is that either you should add a lot of folders to the resources list, or all the material files contain long paths (materials/stonewall/stones_bump.png)
any ideas on this?

[jonim8or]

A small addition:
Here's the asset I've done yesterday. A pedestal for the statue. I still need to figure out how to export a material with bump, specular and diffuse maps

Stage_render.jpg

[Kojack]

That's a cool idea.
Kind of like a smaller version of the unigine heaven demo.

The repository is the tricky bit.
There's the ogre addons svn, but we don't all have access to it (I've got access to at least one directory) and I don't know what it's disk limits are like. (Well, it's on source forge, I've never really looked into their limits).
I can't find any info on bitbucket's size limits.

Maybe dropbox could be a way to go. It's free for 2GB of storage, supports windows/linux/mac/android/etc, does binary diffs for fast syncing, allows folders shared between multiple accounts, has version history and version revert ability (free account has 30 day history).


I was using sintel lite.
I haven't found an online version of sintel's (the movie) full data yet, I think I'd need to buy the 4 dvd set to get it. (The data is all cc, it's just big)
Imagine replacing the ogre dragon model from the skyplane demo with the sintel one. (either cute little one or big adult one)

[duststorm]

Keep in mind that most models of Sintel are probably a bit too high-poly to really use in a realtime engine like Ogre.
While one model of a dragon might still give you a reasonable framerate on a new graphics card, putting that dragon in a scene with terrain, scenery and some shaders will probably bring it down to a very slow crawl.

The Sintel models can however be used to create very nice looking low poly versions by retopo-ing or reducing the originals and baking normal maps. As is already done with the Sintel lite character. (It has the same license as the original Sintel models: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/characters/sintel-lite/)
The original Sintel rig is probably a bit too detailed to be using inside a game engine too. I believe they're using a complex rig created using the new Rigify system in Blender. It has a lot of extra bones and shapekeys for expressing emotions and doing lip sync on the face. I believe Ogre rigs have a maximum bone count and such. There is a Sintel game with BGE in the works, so I believe there are already people working on preparing Sintel material for realtime use.

Another good source for Ogre content could be Makehuman. They now also have lower resolution proxies and simpler rigs which are more suitable for games. Even the original hi-res mesh might be usable in Ogre if we simplify some face details a bit (the inside of the mouth, individual teeth, eyeballs and tongue take up a pretty large amount of polygons). Removing the head "insides" leaves you with an 8000 poly model, which is the polycount some recent games use on their models.
Just an idea, but a MakeHuman head could be used to replace the seriously dated head in the lipsync demo. Makehuman exports a face with lipsync and emotion shapekeys by default in Blender.
I'm currently experimenting with creating a pipeline from MakeHuman to Blender to Ogre for quickly creating some crowds of people (clothed of course in my application and will post my findings and maybe some asset donations when it's ready.

What would be usable licenses for art contributions to Ogre? Is a CC Attribution acceptable for inclusion in Ogre demos (granted that we include credits for the model with the distribution).
If shareAlike is acceptable, I have a suggestion for an Ogre asset: Flick the pirategirl, a new buddy for Sinbad (they kind of fit together because she's also in a cartoony style):

flick.jpg

http://www.blendernation.com/2010/12/24 ... irategirl/

That gives me an idea, why not do a pirate-themed scene complete with harbour village and a large beautiful pirate ship! Of course our very own Sinbad will be at the helm.

[jonim8or]

A pirate theme would also be nice yes. And the nice thing is that a lot of the scenery (houses, paved roads, statue, etc) can be used for both medieval and pirate theme.
I think it is very useful to test which features of rigging in blender are correctly exported to ogre. And for that the flick model would be perfect I think.
About the license: most important is to make sure which license belongs to which model. The flick-model for example is non-commercial only.
And I think it would be good to have an optional info-box in the demo where you can show the names of all the contributors.

[Zonder]

How about making it an island medival town in center and a road way to the pirate town. could place a montain somewhere to show the terrain off a bit more?

Decided to do some programmer art

techdemo.jpg

[duststorm]

It only misses some cliffs near the sea with an evil skull shaped treasure cave
And aligators, lots of aligators

And indian natives.

And maybe a swamp inhabited by a voodoo lady...

Or is this starting to look too much like Monkey Island?

[Zonder]

the montains were supposed to be against the shore line my drawing skills are crap . But yes cliffs should be somewhere in there as well

You also got me thinking the actual island shape could be the ogre heads profile like top of forum

[jonim8or]

Awesome ideas! How about having the skull-shaped rock in an ogre-skull-shape?

However there is something we need to keep in mind. The original setup was to create new assets for the Ogre demos (which will be part of the SDK package). we must be a bit careful with our amount of assets, and the file sizes.
We could start with the demo, and then extend it into a separate application later on (which includes Skyx, hydrax, etc)

[duststorm]

I see a potential for an Ogre ultimate demo, which would include extra features like atmospherics, water, shaders, vegetation and extra assets but I agree it should be separate from the Ogre distribution.

Nice ideas about the ogre head shape by the way!

[jonim8or]

Here's a gun model I've made. Anyone interested in texturing / painting it? it's already UV mapped.

gunrender.png

I think it's getting time to setup some way of sharing and collaborating on the files.
With bitbucket you need to pay if you want to have more than 5 contributors
Dropbox is an interesting option. I doubt whether we need a lot of version control, but some version control would be nice just to be sure.

[Zonder]

Yes should always be remembered it been a tech demo need to try and include as much as possible from ogres features.

I though an island would be better so visually it would look complete as there would be no edges to the terrain as it will be under water.

[Alexiss]

If that can help, I've got a powerful dedicated box, and I could certainly spare 30go (or more if needed) to accomodate a repository. Just let me know what kind of versioning system you'd like and I'll see if I can set it up.

It would also be nice to write a list of people willing to contribute to this project.

[Kojack]

Don't forget that none of this is actually approved by the ogre dev team.
There has been a lot of concern about ogre getting bloated. Currently the media directory that comes with ogre is 58.4MB. We'd want to keep size similar to that where possible, without losing content from the existing samples. Of course better looking textures and stuff may take more space, but not too much.

The larger scale demo is a great idea, but it should be implemented like the magic of stonehenge demo, which is a separate download on the main ogre website. That way we can go all out on it, without worrying about the main sdk growing too big.

So there's really 3 projects here:
- improve and unify current assets
- have a collection of assets for rapid prototyping (which a lot of us use the ninja, robot and sinbad for now)
- make a new kick ass stand alone demo which shows off ogre better

[jonim8or]

That's a good summary there, kojack. thanks!

Concerning the original assets: Here's the source of the athene model. This is what it says about usage in videogames: You may use the model for any none-commercial video, game, or image rendering production.
Can we make a list of which of the current assets need replacement? (and why)

Concerning the download size: I agree that the download size should not increase too much, but that means that there should be a separate collection of rapid prototyping assets for download somewhere. How would we approach that?

[Zonder]

Yes a definat list should be made of things that need replacing. I do think that any assets included with ogre should be licensed in a similar license to ogre. Free to use in commercial or non commercial applications but optional if they author wants recognition. No idea what licenses that would mean i'm rubbish with asset licensing

[CABAListic]

As far as download size goes, keep in mind that replacing binary files will increase the size of the Mercurial repository roughly by the amount of the new files, since it keeps the old ones in history. So if you were replacing the whole media directory with new content of roughly the same size as the original content, it would still add ~60 Mb to the size of the repository.

[duststorm]

The larger scale demo is a great idea, but it should be implemented like the magic of stonehenge demo, which is a separate download on the main ogre website. That way we can go all out on it, without worrying about the main sdk growing too big.

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

It would be a good excercise to coordinate a good way of sharing resources separate from the Ogre code repo, this would partly solve the bloating problem.

If this project really kicks off we should really get the Artist community that uses Ogre involved.

And indeed, sharing binary files on a code repository has the problems Cabalistic indicated. I'm having the same dilemma with the assets for my project too. I basically see two options:
- store the asset files on a webspace. No space is wasted, but no history
- store the asset files on a svn/git/hg repo: each new revision increases the size drastically

Does anyone know of better methods? Are there specialized versioning systems for binary files? What do others use to solve this problem?

[Zonder]

yeah even though svn supports binary diff it's pretty much useless with anything that uses compression which is more or less everything art wise