News Update 5/23/2011 - Weighted Vertices

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Darktooth has written a quick comparison of the new ESF animation system versus the standard Half-life animation system.

A few months ago Ryokeen implemented an animation system that allows models to be rigged with a weighted skeleton. The new system uses vertex weights to assign a single vertex to multiple bones. By doing this, it allows the mesh to deform in a much smoother manner which creates a more realistic look. For example,



This is how the model is in its regular pose, But if we lift the arms up WITHOUT these vertex weights. You can definitely see the strange deformations in the shoulders and neck.



But, when we apply the weights to the vertexes and adjust them to nice setting. This is the outcome that you get



The neck deforms nicely and the shoulders are smooth and round. Our talented coder friend Ryokeen has discovered how to implement this feature into the Half-Life 1 engine. He has made this process VERY easy to setup and takes me only two seconds to get ingame. Each and every character has their own setting that I personally set up to give the mesh a more realistic deformation. This allows us modelers / animators to use less bones on the body for deformation and save them for other areas, such as the face, hair, cape, and clothing.
Let's all give Ryokeen a huge THAAANK YOU!!!


THAAANKKK YOOOUUU Ryoken :love: I hope this will be shared to the custom model creators community too. :p There will be some amazing NEW Models when ESF:Final will be out.
 
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Vertex Thingies FTW!!!

But aren't the Devs supposed to post this in the news section?
 
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Cool stuff. The quality of this mod is still going up i see. ^_^
 
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And moved to news section + renamed.
 
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Nice one, THAAANKKK YOU Ryokeen

Esf:Final is aiming higher and that's a good thing





name fixed
 
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Thx and there is an "e" missing in my Name haha XDD
 
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Very nice but why dose the fps drop from 141 to 43 when you change the animation?
 
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How about releasing the tutorial to the world? :)
 
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Ryokeen. From now on you're my idol. I'll build a gold statue of you to worship every single day to get at least a fraction of your skills and ingenuity
 
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O wow this is epic.

AND I will give this modeler a thanks. Good job ryoken and dt.
 
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Very nice but why dose the fps drop from 141 to 43 when you change the animation?
Dont worry about that, this is not ingame. Its 3d studio max being silly.

Actual ingame gameplay everything runs smooth. You guys have been seeing these vertex weights for almost a year now, we just didn't tell you we had them :)

Vegeta, Ginyu, recoom, guldo, jueice, burter, trunks, freeza.. They all had the weights :)
 
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Neat that you can assign more than one vertex per bone, but was this really necessary of a standalone post given it's basic nature? I mean no offense intended or anything and I realize that progress is growth, but unlike some of your other (semi-)modern features like particular GPU shaders, this is a feature that's been standard in game mesh formats since 1999.

Additionally, I see that you point out that you are using bones for facial and clothing deformations still. This is FAR from proper design and costs a lot more CPU overhead in comparison to vertex-based animations using the same. Didn't Ryokeen add rudimentary vertex pose-state support in NNK (that could be ported) at one point?
 
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Actual ingame gameplay everything runs smooth. You guys have been seeing these vertex weights for almost a year now, we just didn't tell you we had them :)
joke 1 :the cake was a lie? :shocked:

Vegeta, Ginyu, recoom, guldo, jueice, burter, trunks, freeza.. They all had the weights :)
joke 2 : so thats why they can fly so fast in esf:final, they took them off


anw keep up with the good work guys, you are our heroes
 
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Wow, man, your jokes are REALLY funny.
 
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Neat that you can assign more than one vertex per bone, but was this really necessary of a standalone post given it's basic nature? I mean no offense intended or anything and I realize that progress is growth, but unlike some of your other (semi-)modern features like particular GPU shaders, this is a feature that's been standard in game mesh formats since 1999.

Additionally, I see that you point out that you are using bones for facial and clothing deformations still. This is FAR from proper design and costs a lot more CPU overhead in comparison to vertex-based animations using the same. Didn't Ryokeen add rudimentary vertex pose-state support in NNK (that could be ported) at one point?
Were we making a first release ever id give you 100% right., But since this is not the first relese and since we have a community that wants to see progress no matter what kind, its a tad different. Rather than informing the people that we fixed X bugs, we have stuff like this to fall onto in case we only have bug fixes to show for the last couple of months ^^
 
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Neat that you can assign more than one vertex per bone, but was this really necessary of a standalone post given it's basic nature? I mean no offense intended or anything and I realize that progress is growth, but unlike some of your other (semi-)modern features like particular GPU shaders, this is a feature that's been standard in game mesh formats since 1999.

Additionally, I see that you point out that you are using bones for facial and clothing deformations still. This is FAR from proper design and costs a lot more CPU overhead in comparison to vertex-based animations using the same. Didn't Ryokeen add rudimentary vertex pose-state support in NNK (that could be ported) at one point?

Zeth :Neat that you can assign more than one vertex per bone
DT : Its actually, more bones per vertex


Zeth : this is a feature that's been standard in game mesh formats since 1999
DT: Sadly the half-life 1 engine didn't get that memo, so we added it ourselves


Zeth : Didn't Ryokeen add rudimentary vertex pose-state support in NNK (that could be ported) at one point?
DT: NNK, uses facial bones still and keyframed then exported. He just calls those facial bones to play an animation overwriting the previous bones/animation. Not like the mouth in Half-Life story mode.


Zeth : Additionally, I see that you point out that you are using bones for facial and clothing deformations still. This is FAR from proper design and costs a lot more CPU overhead in comparison to vertex-based animations using the same.
DT: I want to have vertex animation but in order to get that particular system ingame and working, itll mean more work, longer release delay, and me going back to redo a crap load of animations that have facials, which is ALL of them to use vertex animation instead. Clothing as well, I talked to Ryokeen about getting it ingame and its definitely possible however because of the OLD half-life engine, it will run like crap ingame. Not to mention not all computers can handle the calculations of cloth based vertexes to prevent them from clipping.


The biggest issue you have to understand, this is the half-life 1 engine and even though we hacked the crap out of it, there still are limitations. A lot of the limitations is that the engine itself can only do so much w/o losing FPS. So we do streamline the process and make things run quick, but it is far from its full potential in which it could be if we were on another engine. its like comparing
ESF to Unreal Tourney 3
both visually look great, but because UT3 has all of its features at its core, it runs much more efficient. While a lot of ours is hacked in on an obsolete engine causing issues.

hopefully this makes sense to you and answers all your questions / comments
 
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Were we making a first release ever id give you 100% right., But since this is not the first relese and since we have a community that wants to see progress no matter what kind, its a tad different. Rather than informing the people that we fixed X bugs, we have stuff like this to fall onto in case we only have bug fixes to show for the last couple of months ^^
Oh I completely understand, Grega. Progress is progress regardless of how you spin it and reporting it to supporters is a priority. My bewilderment comes in that a single topic of this nature was placed as a post on it's own. I don't know whether it's due to the tonality of the post or community reception, but the concept seems a bit sensationalized overall for a rather fundamental aspect.

A similar example would be if say, for instance, you had a news post promoting the addition of view frustum culling or something of the like. If ESF was rolling it's own engine or had an update scheme akin to Overgrowth, I'd completely understand mentioning tiny technical details of common nature (since you'd be working from a blank slate); however, majority of the progress flow and news updates from ESF usually pertain to glamour/glitter before technical substance. I realize (as you've explained before), this is primarily to retain attention and simplify presentation of features for the fans.

I guess to put it bluntly, it's just strange and off-putting (from a developer standpoint) to see a mild technical aspect "pimped" in such a manner using the ESF style of posting.

Zeth :Neat that you can assign more than one vertex per bone
DT : Its actually, more bones per vertex
Right. Flipped wording on my part. Should read "more than one bone per vertex".

Clothing as well, I talked to Ryokeen about getting it ingame and its definitely possible however because of the OLD half-life engine, it will run like crap ingame. Not to mention not all computers can handle the calculations of cloth based vertexes to prevent them from clipping.
Why not use your shader support for a simple noise perturbation function for wind simulation/movement? Not at all costly, no clipping complications (if done right), ZERO work for you, etc.

The biggest issue you have to understand, this is the half-life 1 engine and even though we hacked the crap out of it, there still are limitations. A lot of the limitations is that the engine itself can only do so much w/o losing FPS. So we do streamline the process and make things run quick, but it is far from its full potential in which it could be if we were on another engine. its like comparing
I understand, but you can hardly call this half-life anymore.
 
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Wow Zeth. You're a dick.

*User warned for this post
-DiebytheSword
 
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