Grebbeberg - WIP terrain

[Andy007 10]

will this be useful in arma 3??

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

nice looking windmill

cant wait to play a few missions in our backyard ;)

[DualJoe 10]

will this be useful in arma 3??

Nobody knows.

@BlackMamba: You'll need to be patient then, because there's still an enormous amount of work left. Unless you want to try an empty map.

[DualJoe 10]

http://img171.imageshack.us/img171/7216/4ufkbotdvmkoetswgkokiz.mp4

Needed the animation to get the dimensions and walkway plus railing right and figured to post a rendered version for fun.

Spent some time looking for reference-images and information and changed the model to fit. With the limited information I was able to dig up I think the overal dimensions and sizes are close enough. Could try to make it animated in Arma just for laughs, although in my time-frame it wasn't working and just used as restaurant and lookout.

EDIT
Yikes, imageschack does some nasty things with their reencoding. Guess it's time to look for a better image/video-sharing site that's compatible with this forum. Edited September 20, 2012 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

Could use youtube:

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Since there seem to be quite a number of Dutchies around here, has anyone actually seen the windmill in real life and noticed something glaringly wrong with the model? If not I'll regard the shape final and will continue with the detailing phase.

Little below 3k-tris sofar, which makes me wonder if I should just keep the "propellers" (my english vocabulary is failing me here) as they are, instead of converting to alpha-transparent planes.

[topas 1]

Looks stunning.

I'd keep the sails until it is determined ingame if they're a performance hit or not. Alpha texture, well, for once it won't have a shadow as it should, and it may look strange wih user having problems with their AA (thin white, edgy outlines of the texture when there's smoke in teh background etc.). Looking forward to future updates of this ambitious project. Cheers.

[DualJoe 10]

Ooh thanks for reminding me about the AA-issues, I never would have thought of that.

I tend to not use AA, I despise blurring of any kind in games.

It is slowly proving to be a very ambitious project indeed, I severly underestimated it when I started.

Talking about ambitious projects yours is pretty impressive as well and set a few months before mine. Very nice progress though, makes me kind of jealous.

[topas 1]

Underestimation... Yes, I can fully understand what you mean, as we did exactly the same...

Anyway, I'm kind of jealous too :P Hopefully when our talented terrain/object maker finds time (maybe next month) we'll be able to catch up and have a church of our own too. So far he made only a

, but it gives a nice idea of what we're up against.

During invasion of France the Germans used a lot of equipment captured in Poland just some months earlier. One would need to make proper research to see if it was also the case with Low Countries.

If so, we'd be happy to donate what we can.

[DualJoe 10]

Thanks for the offer, but my plan is to "just" stick to the terrain. The only things I'm focusing on is to recreate the situation from that period. Also trying to get the same choke-points functional in the arma2(3)-engine. I'm confidently hopeful that it will be a completely different experience from most terrains arma-players are used to. Which units the community want to use to experience it I'll leave up to them.

What I would like is to exchange information on how you get the buildings that are beyond arma-engine-spec working ingame.

Secondary goal for this windmill is to test some ideas I have. The huge churchtower and even more humongous railroadbridge are just a tad too cumbersome for experimentation (even with the ingame binoculars).

[DualJoe 10]

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Finished the holes for the windows and doors, which were not as easy as you might think.
Cutting curved holes in a smoothshaded conical shaped cylinder without getting obvious shading artifacts proved to be rather challenging. Also applied some quickly put-together materials to help me with the texturing later.

Anyways getting close to having something to import into Bulldozer. Think I'll leave the interior for a later date (read haven't figured out what to do with the inside yet)

Very soon I will have to confront something which I was avoiding up till now, proxies. So far I just couldn't make sense how proxies work never mind getting them to animate, but that will have to change now with wings rotating at an angle attached to a turning head. Guess I'll look at how turrets work in arma and see if that can be translated to buildings.

Ah and I'll also need to figure out armas material-system which is another confusing subject I have been avoiding. Edited September 21, 2012 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

First crude tests ingame. To see if I can get the scale and height somewhat correct. It also proves that it seems to work even while recording and with a viewdistance of about 2km. Recording on my old hdd brought the framerate waaay down. Considering these are unoptimized models without lods and such, it makes me hopeful that I just might be able to get this extreme detail terrain working.

In the video I'm flying from the far western edge of the map along the river to about halfway and then back again. Clearly not a map for air-operations. This on an older wip-version of the terrain, which means it won't look exactly like this. You can see how the bits I've been focussing on like the riverbanks and defensive positions at the base of the hill have a lot more detail than the rest. I'm slowly working towards the town and railroad-bridge, which hopefully gives me enough time to finish the buildings and bridge and get them to merge together.

Spoiler alert, if you don't want to know the layout of the map beforehand don't watch this video.

bc7RqN49z-g

I have my doubts about the size of the windmill, here's an aerial view of the area around the time.

http://beeldbank.grebbeberg.nl/images/greb/ansicht/hires/ansicht_151.jpg (2383 kB)

Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me because of the white materials and fish-eye ingame view.

Edited September 23, 2012 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

Nope I was right, the mill is about twice the size that it is in O2. I've used the exact same config as I did for the tower.

I can't figure out what's going on here, why is the tower correct and the windmill scaled up?

Is there some hidden scaling flag whigh you need to toggle somewhere?

EDIT

Nevermind, I deleted the files and repacked the model a few times and now it works. Maybe a temporary or cached file that was interfering.

Edited September 23, 2012 by DualJoe
fixed it

[DualJoe 10]

Warning very white movie. The mill is supposed to white, but not like this.

MplY2Eu01So

First test ingame of a completely redone model. I've gone extreme low-poly on the main-tower. This was an experiment to see if I could use the shading artifacts to give it some subtle variantions make it look less digital. In the video I'm looking for shading problems and trying out my quick interior layout I'm also checking the height of windows and such. Apart from being unable to look out of the uppermost windows I'm pleasantly surprised by the result.

Unless someone sees some major issues, I'll be slowly working towards a complete LOD-set. Most of my time however is spent trying to figure out how. All those config files are not my strongpoint, so it wll be a while before I'll dare try animations and such.

[larsiano 12]

I like where this is goin... It looks great! Will the 'turret' be rotatable (for Arma ]I[ wind direction changes)? And will the buildings be available in the editor or downloadable as standalone mod for others to use?

[DualJoe 10]

The model was made with rotations in mind. To be more accurate it was rotating while modeling, no way everything would fit otherwise.

My plan was to have a user action at the winch-wheel (kruiwiel) to turn the mill into the wind, maybe also the option to toggle the brake via the rope hanging from the lever on top. Ideally I then wanted the "blades" to react to windspeed and direction, with varying turning speeds.

I pm'd Mondkalb about it, because I thought his radio-telescope was just the thing I needed. He told me it should be possible to have both rotating blades and a turning head, but his tests showed him there's only one way to achieve smooth looping rotations for the "blades". Bad news is that this an on or off option only, no speed variations.

Can't say I'm too happy about that, but what can I do?

Biggest obstacle in all if this though is me. I'm new to all this, but most of all I'm not a programmer and I'm really struggling with the configuration part. For now I'm just copying other configuration files and replacing little things of my own. But to be honest I have no idea what I'm doing. Things like classes and inheritance mean something completely different to me than it does here. On top of all this I have a disability that severly limits me in this area.

This brings me to the addon and release part. I've got no problems with the idea of releasing as I go, but I don't know how (yet).

First I'll need to learn how to organize and make an addon that does not break stuff in the rest of the game. Also haven't got a clue yet how tags and key-signing and all that works.

Edited September 25, 2012 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

I've been working on the interior and details. Most of which you can't see from the outside.

I couldn't stand the empty rooms so I decide to include some of the mechanical bits, which I'll then have to animate as well.

I'm trying to work out if I should put some sniper-positions in the rotating head.

I've already made some windows at the back as you can see above. Now I'm wondering if I should put some in the front as well.

In the open cross-section above I've put 2 white-gray blocks where I'm planning on putting the extra windows.

Next I'll have to figure out a way that you can climb up and lie down in front of those windows, without blocking the stairway-entrance when the head is turned.

Does anybody know if proxies get culled when they are obstructed from view by the main object, or are they directly linked to the main LODS?

For example if I made all those railing bits and such proxies, would they be culled like other models if they are blocked from view?

Edited September 26, 2012 by DualJoe

[DualJoe 10]

http://imageshack.us/a/img441/8535/binnenmolenv008.png (1059 kB)

Low poly sails with baked details. Normalmap looks better in the 3d-window than it does in this render, which I'm hopeful will hold true for Arma as well. Took me quite some time to get something useful out of Blenders cloth-simulator and then get that baked on to a low-poly version. Not too shabby for my first try if I say so myself.

I noticed something interesting with the normalmap, maybe I can replicate this fake backlit effect I'm seeing in the Blender 3d-view right now.

Anywayz, enjoy the view while I take a breather.

[Robster 11]

Hi Joe Joe ;)

How many polys do you have in 0 ResLOD ??? all those windmill sticks seem to be a lot... have you done some previous tests in-game?

It's a beautiful work so far,

Cheers

[DualJoe 10]

A few posts back I've put up some videos of ingame tests. Difficult to answer the 0-lod question, because I haven't decided what I'll put in there yet.

The model in the video if I triangulate in O2 the bottom status-bar says 6873 faces. This number will have increased a bit in the meantime, because I've been adding the mechanics and the sails, but not by much. I suspect it will be around 10-12k when I'm done. I was going for low-poly, but didn't expect it to be this low.

I'm trying to figure out a way to do some tests with proxies and LODS. I don't know yet how I'll be able to test if proxies have their own level of detail levels and if they are occlusion culled by the main object itself. Part if the bag of tricks I'm trying to accumulate to get the big church-tower with functional interior working ingame.

Edited September 27, 2012 by DualJoe

[domokun 515]

I just spotted your flyover video of Grebbeberg and I'm well impressed!

OK the textures are poor but they're placeholders right?

This map is refreshingly different from most out there.

It would be perfect for the i44 mod as the lack of helos force troops to appreciate every contour of the terrain.

But appart from swimming, what options are available to our plucky infantryman?

Did they use inflatable craft or did they just wade?

[DualJoe 10]

Yeah I haven't gotten to the texture phase yet. First I have to make the 3d-terrain which is not that easy working from old maps and faded photographs. Also I planned to have some buildings which have to be integrated into the 3d terrain like bunkers and the big railroadbridge.

Since I'm new to arma-addon making I figured I'd first try something smaller so I started working on the churchtower, but that turned out to be a bit too large to easily do some experiments on. I've made the windmill over the past week or so as a stepping stone towards the bridge and the rest of the 3d-terrain.

The river is non wadeable and swimming across the Rhine in military gear is not an option in real life. Rivers are called blocking obstacles for a reason. The railroad-bridge is the main and only river-crossing for that area and that is also why the defensive positions are further to the east (erm well actually it's the other way around but you get the point). Technically the Germans weren't able to break through here and even though this was a focal point of their attack, they were fought to a standstill here. They did come as far as the railroad, but the Dutch had demolished the bridge by then. However in the meantime another part of the German-forces had gone around to the south and some 80 kilometers further downstream did a combined attack on the harbor-city Rotterdam. The Dutch government had kind of expected the Germans to somewhat respect their neutrality and pass on by to the south-east en-route to France like they did in the big war before. So the large bombing operation on a mostly civilian area kind of shocked the Dutch government into capitulation.

It was naive on multiple levels to think that would bring an end to bombing and fighting in the area, or that the Germans would make the same mistake twice by leaving such a key area outside of their control. The Netherlands and Rotterdam in particular is the gateway to Europe. The whole point of the beach landing and later Operation Market-Garden was to gain control of the harbour and the bridge-to-far a few kilometers further upstream. Unfortunately the Germans valued the area a lot more than the Dutch government (ever) did (or does).

Kind of elaborate answer, but it wouldn't have been clear if I had just said D-day and Operation Market Garden is how they tried to cross the river.

[chrisb 196]

Really intricate model making, looks great..:)

[DualJoe 10]

@ChrisB: Thanks

I wanted to have the model with completed LODs working today, but I've run into a snag with proxies. No matter what I do, the proxy objects are scaled way down. I haven't been able to find any info on proxy scaling.

I've also got a massive headache, which forces me into having a bit of a lie down in a dark room.

[domokun 515]

@ChrisB: Thanks

I wanted to have the model with completed LODs working today, but I've run into a snag with proxies. No matter what I do, the proxy objects are scaled way down. I haven't been able to find any info on proxy scaling.

I've also got a massive headache, which forces me into having a bit of a lie down in a dark room.

T'was not an elaborate explanation. On the contrary it was the start of an excellent summary. Problem with youngsters these days is their "TL DR" attitude. If you're only ever going to skim read, you'll never really learn much, let alone understand or appreciate.

As for illness, funnily enough I know exactly how you feel, as yesterday I had my first day of sick leave in almost a year (nasty bout of viral throat infection).

Take care of yourself and you'll recover quicker. Personally I find a hot toddy works wonders - boiling hot water, lemons (ideally fresh, better still limes), ginger (ideally fresh) and add honey to your taste. If you're feeling really under the weather a few tots of rum go down the hatch nicely!

[DualJoe 10]

@Domokun: I also like the general populous on these forums more than most other places on the internet. Also thank you for your concern, but not to worry I'm not exactly coming down with something.

It might show through my comments here and there, that I'm a former Royal Dutch Army man, who had a silly accident at work.

To put it simply I got dropped on my head and as it turned out that seems to be a big nono as far as heads go.

I never expected such a little thing could have such a major effect on someone.

So little mister Splittin' Headache here is not my only new friend, although he does tend to be a bit of an attention grabber.

He did kind of push me to figure out the proxy-problem I was having, which seems to be some kind of caching issue with O2 / windows. A cold start instead of my usual suspend-to-ram magically solved the scaling "feature".