Hi there guys, i've been following polycount for years and i never really posted anything great so I am taking the chance right now. First, i'd like to introduce myself. My name is Romulo Fernandes and i'm a professional Java and C++ developer. On game / graphics development, I worked mainly on modifications for Quake 3 but over the last 4 years i developed my own engine, i call her cgTech1. cgTech1 is far from done but its shaping nicely (mainly for a one-guy-work), so here i am, asking you to help me test and improve this tool. Since it is alpha quality (and 64 bit only) i expect it to crash, bug and everything else, but I am taking suggestions, making improvements and adapting it, to create a good, free and professional tool to view models in real time. Thanks.

Here it is. Thank you very much once again.
http://www.castorgroup.net/cgtech/do...id=modelviewer

Some mandatory shots of it:

Ninja Girl from SDK page:



Just a sphere with a simple glass material:


From Fewes:



WIP shots:





Disclaimer: I do NOT own those models. All of them were created by members of the polycount community. They were just used for testing.

Nice stuff will check it out. Been experimenting with WEBGL for a online model viewer but havent worked on it in a while. Something UI wise, maybe render a smaller version/resize the texture so its easier for artists to use. Will post more feedback when I check it out.

Really an excellent program that gives beautiful results, but if i may make one suggestion, the one thing that i find myself missing tremendously is an emissive / glow channel for the textures. Excellent work!

Nice job so far. I like how light weight and bare bones it is. Things I'd like to see:

• A way to pivot the camera around a center point instead of the free roaming fps style navigation. It would be more intuitive for artists to be able to rotate around the model like in 3d authoring applications. I think keeping the fps style as an option could be really useful though for large scenes.
• Quick way to "frame" the camera to the model's bounding box like the "f" key in Maya.
• A quick way to flip the channels of the normal map.
• More lighting options. Also, more intuitive way of adjusting the light direction.
• More texture maps/materials such as emissive, environment, sss, aniso, etc. I imagine most people who want to use this viewer to preview assets probably aren't going to use most of the materials you have right now.

Marmoset Toolbag has a lot of great features that I'm sure you've probably taken note of. What you've got so far makes a really nice and free alternative though!

I didn't get a chance to DL it, Timeout issues with my ISP provider, but let me ask this, how large are you trying to make this and what are you trying to expand on?

For example, for the Specular, a Blinn which has been Lerped with an Anistropy setup, and everything mutiplied by Schlicks formula pretty much will encompass every type of material for a specular term out there, but it can get pretty heavy.

Also, you could have an Ambient color control option, where you have the Up-Vector fed into a Lerp, to that the user can cast separate colors for the top and bottom tangents of the mesh.

I could be talking out of my arse for all I know for you could have implemented all this or are planning to.

Almost forgot, is there a specific baker one should use for normal maps? If you're making the viewer free, maybe implement the tangents from xNormal?

It crashed when trying to bring a model that was quads.

@haiddasalami
Yeah, Quads are not supported yet. I still have to write some functions to convert it, should be pretty easy, i just haven't done it yet.

@Bauken
Thanks for the comments, i hope it will be useful to someone

@haikai
Thanks for comments. About the suggestions, they are very welcome and i will put them on my todo list. Like i wrote on the wiki, there are going to be more pivot types, like for rotation and scale and that should make light positioning easier. Also, on the first version the camera used a pivot and rotated around it but i later changed that, i will come back with that feature on a check box

@Doris15
Your links are broken.

@Ace-Angel
How large i am trying to make it? As good as a i can, but without killing myself in the process. This software is a one-man-only work and the only help i receive (and it 's a big help already) is from users telling me what they need next. I don't plan to expand the lighting system atm, mainly because i have tons of other things to work, but thanks for the suggestion. About the normals, i will make some option to flip channels, so any tool will be capable of generating normals for it.

Totally understandable, as for the normals, I meant the tangents, so if someone bakes with one SG group without breaking normals, it would still work.

For example, Blender and xNormals are synched, Marmoset is 90% synched, Max is synched to nothing, etc.

I haven't really considered that. Now that you said, i will think about it
Once again, thanks. If you have more stuff to suggest, feel free and spread the word!

shadow support planned?

Originally Posted by Ace-Angel

Totally understandable, as for the normals, I meant the tangents, so if someone bakes with one SG group without breaking normals, it would still work.

For example, Blender and xNormals are synched, Marmoset is 90% synched, Max is synched to nothing, etc.

lol, what is 90% synced? 90% = synced to nothing.

When displaying my models the most important thing to me is the lighting. The system should allow for multiple lights, 3+ and allow them to be placed quite a bit easier. I fumbled around for a bit trying to get the rotation/orientation of the lights to be what I wanted, but eventually gave up.

+ Better system for placing lights
+ 3+ lights
+ flip normals

Great effort so far!

@Quack
It already allows more than 3 lights, infact, there's no limit of how many lights you can add. Maybe the interface is confusing, dunno. Normal channel flipping and a better way to place/rotate/scale too

Originally Posted by nightz

@Quack
It already allows more than 3 lights, infact, there's no limit of how many lights you can add. Maybe the interface is confusing, dunno. Normal channel flipping and a better way to place/rotate/scale too

Well I guess I just didn't dive into it enough to find out how to add more lights. I will give it another look!