Quote:Original post by dudethedreamer
i want to model a model that is dismember-able for games. so far i think i should model each limb as a seperate element inside the mesh, but what else is there to acomplishing this besides the programming part?

It depends on what type of model it is. Skinmesh or segmented? Either way, you've got it right. There are a lot of other great side effects to defining different body parts with materials. For example, you can hide certain body parts when clothing is equipped. The body skinmesh only renders what is openly visible, while a clothing skinmesh renders over what is not. And this is exactly how you can remove limbs.

The difficult part about it is getting a smooth transition between two skinmesh parts (if you've ever played Vampire: Masquerade or Half Life 2, you'll see they failed on the neck area of characters). I found the best way to do this is to leave padding around the parts. For example, if you model a swappable arm that is chopped off at the elbow, the shoulder part needs to blend into the body just like the real arm did. So you model the chopped arm with a single row of polys of the chest still attached, but make those polys a blank material that you can discard once loaded into your game.

An alternative method, which I eventually used, would be to create a program that can extract individual subsets from a mesh and save them as seperate meshes. The normals around the split will remain intact, which is something modeling programs do not do. Then you can just leave the entire chest with the severed arm, if you wanted, and delete it with your program.

Whatever you do, the vital thing is to keep the vertex weights and polygon normals the way they are. And that means that the chest you include with your severed arm needs to use the exact same vertex bone weights as your normal character's chest, and that allows any type of extreme skin bending in the game without cracks or seperation.

Quote:i also want to explode things into pieces, say i shoot a foot, would i simply delete that foot element and show some meat particle and blood splattering?

That's exactly what you would do. Just insert a lot of splattering or other bits around the area that will be removed so that players cannot see it vanish.

Quote:also i need help with making trees and water, i got them but they are sad, plus i dont know how to set water on land so i am stuck there, like how to make it flow on a certian path that flows down hill, if you guys can also help there, thanks

Meh, I can't make trees or water very well either. Someone in the graphics / visual arts forums might be able to help. Actually, I think this whole post would do a bit better there.

Aha!

Exactly what we are looking to implement through a fantasy fps/rpg.

If you are looking at testing this out in a project then the Terror Visual team are always on the look out for decent modelers.

Check us out at: www.terrorvisual.com

Also feel free to email me dan[dot]lodge[At]ntlworld.com for fresher details/progress. The website is a little stale >.<

Maybe our modelers can help you with the water and trees...

[Edited by - bam104 on July 14, 2006 7:24:09 AM]