Cheetah 3D and Collisions?

Dude

Dude

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Cheetah 3D and Collisions?

I've looked through the manuals and perused the forum threads but could find no mention of this. Maybe I've asked the wrong search questions or overlooked something. I am greener than grass...

Can Cheetah 3D produce collision meshes for a model?

I am currently working on a few models to be used in an Unreal Tournament 3 map and while I can make the models on C3D I have to have someone with Maya or 3D Max to convert it to the rouge formats that UT3 uses, .mb and .ase. (I believe Martin is working on the plugin architecture to allow for a conversion plugin such as this in the future...hurry Martin...just kidding.)

A friend of mine is doing just this. It is he who brought it to my attention about collisions and poly count. Poly count, I should have remembered. I knew it but forgot to delete all of the unused faces in my models. He did this for me, greatly optimizing my model for UT3, and then asked if I wanted collisions for the models. That is how the question came about.

Thanks. :smile:
 
Assuming collision meshes are just meshes, there's no reason why you couldn't make them in C3D. (I'm pretty ignorant of what UT's editor expects.)
 
podperson said:
Assuming collision meshes are just meshes, there's no reason why you couldn't make them in C3D. (I'm pretty ignorant of what UT's editor expects.)
Click to expand...

Thanks for answering podperson. I pretty much assumed that most folks here wouldn't know what I was talking about.

You're partly right . A collision mesh is an invisible, extremely simple wireframe, that covers the main model so that it appears solid and is interactive with its surrounding world. Whenever things interact, (like a bullet hitting the model), in UT3 with another model the game engine has two choices; 1) to deal with the collision on a per poly basis, which eats up graphics performance, or, 2) to collide with a much simpler "collision hull", sometimes just a few dozen polys compared to the thousands that may make up a model, and thus save precious graphics process involvments.

You can make a collision mesh in Maya, convert it to a single mesh and give it a cryptic name so the UT Editor will understand it. Once imported into the Editor both the model and its collision mesh act as one model.

One reason that C3D doesn't do this is probably because there is no reason for C3D to do it. I'm stuck between two worlds. I refuse to purchase either Maya or 3D Max, for Windows or Mac, and go with something from the Mac world, Cheetah 3D. And not because I can't afford it. I just can't stand anything with a Windows-like interface. Every piece of software that I own for the Mac that has a cousin in the Windows world, looks so much better and runs so much better than its Win counterpart. No one in the Win world apparently has any imagination. 'Nuff said.

I'm in OSX now, obviously, so I will boot into Windows and the Editor and take an example screenshot for you and edit this post. I believe you are the type that is interested in learning about other things. Then you will have a visual to go with the written.

Back later.

***EDIT*** Here you go. I've placed a description on each pic for simplicity. Any questions, let me know. :smile:
 

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Makes perfect sense. C3D of course can help you produce any mesh you want, but setting names correctly or getting UT to treat them as collision meshes is going to be your problem (although you might be able to write a script to automate it).

You might also look at whether there are tools/scripts available for Blender to do this. (Blender is free but fairly unpleasant to use -- but you may be able to model in C3D and post-process in Blender).

A lot of us (myself included) are using C3D for game development using Unity, and building a simplified mesh for use as an invisible collision mesh (or for physics in general) makes perfect sense (and we could do it with Unity, and automate it via naming convention in C3D).
 
I just checked out Unity. It is very similar to what I have been doing. This looks like a very powerful development platform and is interesting indeed. How is its stability?
 
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