2 questions for Low poly modeling

[volaille]

Hello.

as mentioned in the title, I have tow questions about low poly modelling.

1) How dose animated textures actually works ?
I'm talking about this characters that can blink or open there mouth with textures.
how do I set-up it (maya or max) what should I know about that ?

here an example :

http://img848.imageshack.us/img848/3871/ff3dslunethfreelancer.png

and the other one :

is there a easy way to show and view a 3d model in actual 3d? turning around, panning and rotating.
this kind of stuffs.

thanks.

[poopipe]

I suspect they're shifting UVs in that example, the same way animated sprites are usually handled in 2d games - the image is non square so i suspect it's not just the one texture in what you've posted

There's no really straightforward way to set that up in max - whatever you do it's going to involve either parameter wiring/reaction manager or some scripting. I imagine its a similar process in Maya.

Marmoset is probably the easiest way to get a model into a realtime renderer so's you can spin it around etc. Unity is pretty straightforward though - as is UDK

[volaille]

I'll check marmoset.^^

as for the textures, It seems still unclear how to put it up, even though you've helps narrowing it down .

[fonfa]

http://i.imgur.com/aTzZ7.jpg

Open up the material editor in max, then select a map (diffuse, normal, anything).
See those sliders under 'coordinates'? You can animate them. So you just offset your uvs around.

[volaille]

How !

I never noticed that.
Pretty handy. thanks :)


edit:

But is that relay light enough for less powerful platforms (I'm thinking about DS and co) I mean , you have to load at lest 2 textures instead of 1 !

just wondering.

[Mark Dygert]

You can also animate the UV's by turning on autokey, moving the time slider a few frames and moving the UV shells around in the UV editor.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2336353/LavaBubble.gif

Of course there would be some kind of wrangling in whatever engine to get whatever system working like it should.

In UDK there are ways to animate, scroll, scale and position of UV's in the material editor, this can be linked up using Kismet so the player blinks every few seconds, or the UV's animate when a specific sound file plays.

In other engines you might only have two states, opened and closed those could be separate UV channels that the engine flips between when needed.

Most other engines have their own unique way of handling the same type of tasks that are specific to their workflow.

[volaille]

Ok. so It's up to the engine most of the time... good to know!
this UV moving stuff works pretty well I must say ! even though it looks kind of barbaric... but if the engine handle it, that's fine to me :)

Thanks a lot to you 3 !
now it's time to run some test !!

[volaille]

I just came up with another silly question for you guys.

I've always worked on Windows (currently 7 64 bits) and I've only recently tried Mac OSX and I'm now jalous of the default image viewer this OS have. by default it read .psd .tiff .eps .ai and with the press of a button a can have a quick look at the file.

this could relay speed up my work flow if there were a way to get those kind of features on windows 7.

So, dos something like that exist on win7 ? or is that OSx's specific features ?

[Mark Dygert]

Not exactly... nothing is that well integrated and easy to use. There are 3rd party apps like XnView that view more file formats and can be set as the default viewer. There are also some hacks to force windows to display .tga's but I don't think there is anything that supports .psd's...

http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html
http://download2.xnview.com/screenshots/browser-700x560.gif

[Ghostscape]

xnview is free and is awesome.

[volaille]

too bad its not as well implemented as in osx... but hey! that's not to shabby!

I'm learning a lot thanks to you :)
thanks a lot !