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DualJoe

Modular Objects (mostly buildings for now)

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This post is probably mostly of interest for people wanting to add terrain-objects like buildings and such.

Faced with the challenge of filling my Dutch terrain with objects that are neither East-European nor Desert-themed I had an idea to speed up content creation plus adding some optional variation. It started in my Grebbeberg WIP thread, but to avoid confusion I think this modular idea should be discussed in it's own thread.

My idea was to attempt to transfer my modular workflow from Blender into the Arma-engine so that non blenderhead-arma-hobbyists could profit from it as well. It is somewhat like the way you can change loadouts and weapons on vehicles and soldiers, but this time for map-objects. In short I'd like to create a library of base-objects with a number of modular components for each of these base objects. The plan is that this would allow for the maximum amount of visual variation with a relatively small amount of work. On top of that, adding or changing modular components and/or their textures should be easier than having to create complete objects from scratch just to add some minor mostly cosmetic changes.

I talked about the idea in a bit more detail in my Grebbeberg-WIP-thread here and here.

Since then I've been trying to piece together a working mockup of a modular building, demonstrated in the gif-animations below. The first one shows the base building and the second a more recent version after I've played with it a little.

f7cw1s.gif nUuYss.gif

Keep in mind this was just an experiment to see what was possible with the limitation of the basic building model (the one with all the things needed to get it to work ingame including AI-pathways and roadways and such). At first I was a bit worried that because it needed to be modular, the buildings would look too generic for this to be a viable option. But now I'm starting to realize the potential of this system, provided I find a way to make it work nicely in the Arma-engine.

So I figured it was time to open a thread about this and see if I could get a ball rolling. I'm curious to see what others think about this and if there is an interest in something like this. Who knows, maybe this could turn into something like CBA for terrain-makers.

Edited by DualJoe

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Good initiative. Problems that may arise within O2:

1. The ai pathway lod still need to be custom

2. The geo and fire lod still need to be custom

3. You might loose a lot of uv space, or of you choose to have more textures per variation, you'll end up with a bit too many sections.

I am not really sure how you have your files setup, BUT: you could have a quick look over modular architecture. You could actually do what those lads at hawken did (they actually created the entire environment from a very limited number of individual files). Irl, especially for suburbs there are a lot of builings that look more or less the same. Unfortunately, afaik hidden selections doesn't work for buildings. I might be wrong here, but you could could have a number of texture variations as well, that should allow you to have a huge number of variations with just a few modular pieces.

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As it stands I haven't worked out exactly, how to implement the modular system inside arma yet, which I'm hoping I can get started with sometime next week.

All the variations in the model I've shown would work with the exact same AI-pathway lod. (Door animations for different doors and locations is a different story though, but might still be possible if user actions can be hidden reliably)

Geo and fire lods work inside proxies as far as my tests have shown.

Haven't tested performance yet, but for now I'm not worried. I can have hundreds of my fairly complex windmill-model ingame and onscreen without a drop in framerate. In comparison these modular buildings will be ridiculously lowpoly, plus LODs work with proxies as well.

If by hidden selections you are referring to the same system that is used for partial destruction, then the mechanics are most definitely working ingame even for realtime switching of modular parts. Now that I think about it, partial destruction works in the exact same way as what I'm trying to do and afaik also works fine with fire/geom-lods with AI.

Concerning UV-textures; I haven't experimented with this part of the Arma-engine yet. I've been having some eyesight problems for a while now, which means I'm having problems reading at the moment. Once that clears up I intend to dig into it and figure out how the material system works. Especially areas that effect performance, for example if it's possible to share resources like textures without increasing the VRAM too much. For now I haven't got a clue how Arma-materials work yet, how many layers/textures can be used, different rendering passes, if I can have a separate lightmap UV or not, if things like on the fly hue changes are possible for color variations. However the only issue I'm a bit worried about is lightmapping, overlaying uv's to save on texturespace is hard for baked lighting.

EDIT

Tried to find something on hawken. Are you talking about the mech-game? Could you post a link for the modular bits then? Their youtube videos and screenshots are so bad I can't see s...! Almost as bad as the overexposed bright stuff thats on the BF3 buildings. Is that a new trend or something? Either produce random noise or destroy visibility to such a degree that you can't tell what you're looking at, not even what color it is.

Keep in mind that it needs to work within the limits of the arma-engine. I've seen some other projects with very impressive procedural buildings including stress calculation and dynamic destruction (even one in the Blender-game engine), but that won't do us much good in Arma, unless I suddenly level-up into a sqf-coding-god.

Edited by DualJoe

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Very nice idea!

I had another idea concerning buildings, i dont know if this fits in here, but what is speaking against declaring buildings as vehicles, but leaving out the proxy for the driver? That way buildings could burn and you could e.g. add chairs into the building and people can sit down on the chairs via cargo proxies. It would also IIRC enable you to use hidden selections.

I hope that this concept works and we might soon have customizable buildings :)

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In that case it would be more practical to make the chairs into vehicles. AI can't walk around inside vehicles.

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In that case it would be more practical to make the chairs into vehicles. AI can't walk around inside vehicles.

Interesting idea :)

Anyway, i dont want to derail your thread more than necessary. Good luck with your concept, i ll keep watching your progress :)

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