large building model - design questions for easy O2 port

[eggbeast 3673]

hi guys

 

We are making a map of Hue city 1968, and as a result we have some interesting models to build.

We have 3d artists who can make awesome buildings but have never made stuff into P3d, and model riggers who can do all p3d stuff but never imported a fbx model to OB.

 

There is a mutual gap in our knowledge surrounding the design choices in the model program, which then affect the work needed to rig the models (shadow and geo especially) in OB.

 

Our first trial building together is the MACV compound in Hue - it has a 2 storey, 5 rooms per storey block, and all will be enterable (As this is the main US base in the city)

 

So Fox has made an awesome start modelling the building.

 

He gave me the fbx as a converted obj as for some reason i dont have the impoirt fbx option in OB (any ideas? i have the fbx.dll present)

 

It looks like this in his program:

 

 

So the model is 45m long. I am concerned that the properties of geo and shadow and so on may fail if it is too long, based on tetets work on the nimitz carrier.

When i import it, the whole model is one giant selection, and i cannot select parts to make a geo from.

so we are trying to work out how he should design this building optimally for rigging in OB.

As it stands it is impossible to make geo or shadow lods, except to make each piece by hand.

 

The 10 offices are identical, so we could proxy the innards, or make one geo and shadow by hand and multiply it 10x.

 

The model is not yet uvmapped. we wanted to test scale of doors and stairs etc in game first. but can's as we cant make a geo easily.

 

but what are the best design choices to make?

1. in the original model, how would you design it to be able to import and work with in OB? currently it is one piece all bridges together with over 900 bridges in the model.

2. how is it best to design the model in pieces? should we make the whole thing in separate chunks? should we make one office and then import it as a proxy 10 times? with a roof, floor and balcony and doors added after?

3. what is best export process ? how to import selections in OB so they can be used to make geo and shadow more easily?

4. any idea why i dont have a import fbx in my OB program? i have fbx.dll dated sep 2016, size 3054 kb

 

any and all suggestions welcome

pls forgive our ignorance!

 

thanks!

[eggbeast 3673]

@eggbeast, from Uro: also get them to make sure the DLL Folder path is defined within OB's options -
\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Arma 3 Tools\ObjectBuilder

 

mine was set to an old drive letter, since changed. this now works. so 4 is answered!

 

[PuFu 4591]

1. i really don't get what you mean by "bridges" 

2. a single file should do since each proxy is considered another section. There is no more limit to vertices normals, so might wanna do it all in one

3. i personally use 3ds max plus bitxt exporter script. Reason is, .fbx has issues with 2 uvs sets and smooth groups...not sure how other deal with things that need more than a single uv set

 

overall, i would split the model into 2 (interior and exterior) and unwrap a single room than copy it 10 times over.

Also, that model does have a lot of room in terms of details to be added, it is really lp now.

[LJFox 56]

Thanks for the reply Pufu.

 

1. I use the word "bridges" to describe the polys that connected my outer shell of the building with my interior items (rooms and stairway). There probably is an official term for this, but being for the most part a self taught 3D artist I am unsure of any other way of describing it. 

3. I use maya for my modelling but I am to export it out other formats other than .fbx, we trialled to see which format would be better for importing (.obj or .fbx). From your feedback I think we'll just stick to .obj.

4. The model is lp because i've never done anything like this before arma and I wasn't sure if the building needed to be all in one piece or not, so having it as lp as I could get it would've helped if it worked as one object. I'll go ahead and separate the model into exterior and interior (1x office and stairwell) and see how I go. Will I have to fill in the holes left behind after I separate these pieces?

[PuFu 4591]

7 hours ago, LJFox said:

Thanks for the reply Pufu.

 

1. I use the word "bridges" to describe the polys that connected my outer shell of the building with my interior items (rooms and stairway). There probably is an official term for this, but being for the most part a self taught 3D artist I am unsure of any other way of describing it. 

3. I use maya for my modelling but I am to export it out other formats other than .fbx, we trialled to see which format would be better for importing (.obj or .fbx). From your feedback I think we'll just stick to .obj.

4. The model is lp because i've never done anything like this before arma and I wasn't sure if the building needed to be all in one piece or not, so having it as lp as I could get it would've helped if it worked as one object. I'll go ahead and separate the model into exterior and interior (1x office and stairwell) and see how I go. Will I have to fill in the holes left behind after I separate these pieces?

1. got it. You can detach the interior faces (walls, ceiling, floor) of each room without a problem. I actually export things from max based on the multimats i wanna use, and weld them back in O2

2. you won't be able to use .obj or .3ds simply because neither will export the 2 uv sets you'll need (uvset 0 for textures and uvset 1 for lighmap, mask and mc map). So it is either fbx or you use some community made script

3. from a modelling perspective. it is ok the route you've taken - i usually model things clean, then add details (or break corners, create damage directly in the model etc).

for break the model between interior and exterior, in practice there should be no holes left, just overlapping vertices that could be otherwise welded...see p1

[eggbeast 3673]

thanks pufu, that's some great advice, just what we needed.

can you comment on named selections at all?

 

I got the model from Fox yesterday as one big selection, and as an experiment (to see best work process for all the other buildings to come) I hand made the geo lod from his model.

 

this was the single selection i had imported

 

I had to hide the upper floor and balconies using vertex selection, then copy and paste chunks of walls and rooms into edit lods, and then remove faces and delete vertices until i had 8 for the outside wall, then convex hull. rinse and repeat for each part of the office wall, windows, doors etc

Also because Fox had modeled the interior and exterior walls with removed vertices as though it was only for what you can SEE, many walls had 6 instead of 8 vertices, so i had to manually recreate them in order to make convex geometry blocks. very time consuming.

 

In the end we have 371 components and it took me 6 hours to build and scale to match the lod0 solid block model. it felt like the same amount of work to make this as if i had made the original building, so it seems our production line is inefficient so far.

 

 

 

If he could export it with named parts it would be about an hours work to click each selection, press D and then convex hull, with a bit of adjustment to remove some unnecessary blocks. and in terms of the creative production line, a green light for future.

 

Fox is using maya and can export fbx as I now have import fbx options. any idea about best way to add and keep selection names from maya to OB?

 

Also we might proxy one office and then repeat it 10 times, with a modified set of 3-4 textures made for the interior, so we can apply them in OB to create some randomness. So another design question arises:

 

As an OB modeler, making the geo, i would make the interior and exterior together as one block, and then stick them together in 2 rows of 5 and add a giant floor and roof panel, a giant base panel, and the balcony parts - as the pic above shows.  However you are saying he should make an interior and exterior separate for the office parts - is this because of lighting? as when this is imported we would have twice as many parts as before, so the geo derived from lod0 selections (assuming we get that to work) might be 500+ pieces initially requiring a lot of hand-adjustment and culling of parts.

 

an example might be a wall around a door frame/hole - if we have an internal and external model, we might have 3 parts for that (2 sides and a top) for the inside, and 3 parts for the outside, making 6 convex selections instead of 3.

so making the geo i would need to expand one of the frames to include the other, and delete the other one.

 

p.s. I make the geo as high def at start, then once its gone to be used as fire geo, i reduce detail for actual geo and view geo.

 

we are trying to minimise manual re-working of the basic model in OB. so this is why all the questions about design. bear in mind i have no knowledge of modeling programs whatsoever!

 

thanks!

 

[PuFu 4591]

for geo, i always use box primitives...should be quite a few since it has a lot of windows, but 371 seems quite a lot.

named components, for the visual lods you don't really need any but the damaged parts and all windows and doors and whatever else. (check the A3 sample).

You shouldn't mess with the scale, i model stuff in individual layers and export them 1 by 1, which means on import they fit right where these are needed. I would use the same software if you guys have more than a sigle person working on the same mesh

 

about .fbx, no idea, i know there is a issue with it, i have tried exporting from both max and maya with the same shitty result. that goes only for double uv setup.

 

fbx exports as each object as a separte named selections already

 

if i were you , i would consider dumping skype and joining the public a3 discord channel, you'll find help much faster there then on forums

 

in any case, this is how i set up my mesh (the colors are based on the future mask (black red green blue)
normal view, and expanded based on individual pieces that i will later bring in O2 as named selections - the size of that is 45 m in lenght and 10 in height i think)

http://imgur.com/a/ZXlE0

[eggbeast 3673]

ok thanks so much for this detail

so your red outer wall is one selection?

you would import that into OB, and then how would you make your shadow and geo?

by copying that into an edit lod and then breaking it up manually into small pieces (e.g. wall parts around doors and windows) and making them convex?

 

that's what i'm struggling to understand, how your detailed model gets imported in a way that makes sense in OB, so you don't have to go through the steps of physically recreating the same model piece by piece in geo and shadow.

 

each of the 10 offices above has about 15 parts on each wall front and back, to go around the windows and doors, (and also the windows and doors are present) so that's 30 each x 10 office. you can see how we get to 370 easily.

 

I guess what i'm asking is - should Fox, our artist, make his model so it is in enough pieces to easily convert to geo? if he doesn't we have to recreate it in OB, and it takes a days work almost.

 

looking at your back red wall, that's about 25 pieces of wall, 16 windows and 5 doors, so 46 selections for that one face of your model?

so do you export a model from 3ds with those selections named separately already?

or do you just have to suck it up and manually make your geo from cutting up that wall from a single red wall selection in lod0?

 

[PuFu 4591]

5 hours ago, eggbeast said:

ok thanks so much for this detail

so your red outer wall is one selection?

you would import that into OB, and then how would you make your shadow and geo?

by copying that into an edit lod and then breaking it up manually into small pieces (e.g. wall parts around doors and windows) and making them convex?

 

that's what i'm struggling to understand, how your detailed model gets imported in a way that makes sense in OB, so you don't have to go through the steps of physically recreating the same model piece by piece in geo and shadow.

 

each of the 10 offices above has about 15 parts on each wall front and back, to go around the windows and doors, (and also the windows and doors are present) so that's 30 each x 10 office. you can see how we get to 370 easily.

 

I guess what i'm asking is - should Fox, our artist, make his model so it is in enough pieces to easily convert to geo? if he doesn't we have to recreate it in OB, and it takes a days work almost.

 

looking at your back red wall, that's about 25 pieces of wall, 16 windows and 5 doors, so 46 selections for that one face of your model?

so do you export a model from 3ds with those selections named separately already?

or do you just have to suck it up and manually make your geo from cutting up that wall from a single red wall selection in lod0?

 

note here: i never ever for whatever reason do any sort of real modelling work in O2. I only merge, weld, translate, scale or rotate stuff. In short i only use for setting things up (named properties and selections), i try to do as much as possible in a proper modelling software, including mem points and creation of all lods - visual, geo, shadow etc etc etc - as in all

 

the pieces you see are based on multimats (in this case at least 3). i need them separate for assigning the rvmat file. Again, for stuff that moves and needs animation etc it needs to be a separate object. Not just the red all, the entire exterior is a single selection yes.

 

for shadow, i do it from scratch on top of the primary visual lod - it takes less time to get it properly done that way that any sort of "cheat" based visual lod mesh

for geo: i try to keep it to a minimum. for a mesh that is so repetitive, the top and bottom can be done separably, the rest are a matter of simple snapping box creation and copy paste across. should be "days of work"

 

i NEVER export as 3ds, or obj...as in ever. I either use .fbx (minus structures) or the script Bi provided that saves selection to bohemia txt file format

 

that file is WIP - but it has
1. each door as a separate object with the pivot correctly placed for later adding mem points quickly where the hindges are.

2. each piece of window that is the same instanced so i do the unwrap only once, i then collapse it and move it about so not everything looks the same

3. the sills are a single object or instanced across

4. the metal top parts are of the battlements are a single object

5. 1 single mesh for the exterior (see the exploded part)

6. 2 meshes for the interior - one for the bathrooms and one for the main warehouse

7. 1 mesh for the stair and handrail

8. the exterior ladder has each step instanced and the lateral bars mirrored

 

again, using either .fbx or .txt makes each individual object a named selections. i need the exterior/interior meshes done as i do so i can easily assign back the textures via multimat, i need the rest to either speed up unwrapping or to set my anims.

 

on export all the window frames are gonna be a single object btw, because i do not plan to animate these. BTW, you can easily merge this together in O2 right after import

 

 

 

 

[x3kj 1247]

if the building has many repeating rooms, its efficient to model every LOD for this single room, then copy it as much as you need it. Once done, optimize the resulting LOD (mostly the visual LOD, but also geo LOD) by stitching the individual pieces together and removing all edges/vertices that do not contribute to the shape of it. Doors and everything that should have a different selection can be a seperate mesh.

I use .3ds for exchanging data, never had a problem with it. I dont export everything at once though. I export LODs seperately. If you keep your object names below 8 characters, OB can read and use them as selections as well (longer names get deprecated).

 

In terms of optimal modelling - since buildings use tiled textures, you have no or little issues with UV space (as opposed to unique textured objects like vehicles and handweapons). Making meshes "watertight" (like your visual LOD example seems to be) saves UV space, as you have no spaces that can't be seen by somebody. It would be more suited for weapons and vehicles, but as it increases polycount a balance must be struck. On buildings you have less UV issues, as most stuff is tiled (apart from detail or AO map). This allows for some great poly saving options and tricks, especially when applying custom weighted normals.

 

From this post onwards (plus check out the linked star citizen technical topic, its applicaple to every game basically) you can read my discussion with deltahawk about about custom normals, which can give additional quality to your building without drawback. It can't be applied to every building style (your US house may not be the best candidate), but its good to keep in mind regardless.

 

Just for inspiration how a very optimized exterior can be achieved: I'm working on buildings with some more elaborate wall details (in the vein of neo gothic architecture), where this can be quite a dramatic help. 

 

If you haven't seen it already, here are some findings on building/infantry metrics that could be usefull for you

[sama 67]

My advice is to get away from the actual modelling in OB all together.With blender for instance you can do the lot and just export to OB for final tweaking like component naming etc. Geo lods aee quite easy to make in blender for instance as you can just copy your res lod and project wall faces into convex geometry,or snap added cubes into place etc.

[eggbeast 3673]

thanks guys, Fox is working through this advice atm