Levels with rain

[scallenger]

someone definately needs to create a level with rain in it (since I heard from someone it was possible, but i could be wrong). i am not "skilled" enough to create something like that for the game, but maybe someone else is. i would like to see it.

[Rebel]

Yea, think we'd all like to see that, Scal. Though, thus far, I haven't seen any ideas put forth that make enough sense to me personally which warrants the time, or the effort.

[the ARK]

I think I've heard that an animation could be placed richt in front of Anne's face, although the rain wouldn't have depth. It seems possible to me to extend the animation in far in front of Anne to give an added depth.

[Rebel]

Yea, precisely the type of idea I don't find attractive. 1st off, it'd have to be an animation, and secondly, since it's neither tangible nor a string model, I can't see any method of 'attaching' it to our dear Anne, and even if possible, I still think that it's going to look like a cheap attempt.

[guilherme]

I was thinking untill now who to do it, and I think it isn't so mush dificult.
like rembel sad, make an animation front our Anne, and create a sound like rain, after is only create a variable for exemple $rain and atribute for the flat some higthligth points.
I think like this we can put Anne seeing rain.
LOL

[Rebel]

Eh, I still think it's a silly idea. If you were going to go that route, you might as well create a larger, fragmented model of rain drops textured randomly through a 30 frame animation loop.

[scallenger]

i agree rebel. it wouldnt be worth it with those results. I was just wondering

[Tomi]

Yeah, it was just a silly idea of mine to clue a simple rain animation in front of her body. It doesn´t work! What happens when Anne looks up or down? The rain changing quicly it´s direction isn´t very realistic. It´s going to look as bad as special effects in those old 50´s B-class horrorfilms...




-Tomi

[guilherme]

It is possible, is only put the rain up of her head, the sky may be change for black, so when she looks for anywere she see rain some realoistic.
Do not think like me?

[Remdul]

Moving a rain object with her doesn't always work, walk into a building and it still folows you.

I did a test, and I figured out a way:

http://home.planet.nl/~buijs512/trescom/rain.jpg
software-mode to left, hardware to right

I tooks a simple flat plane, textured it with a rain texture (plain white) and a opacity map (black with white dots). I mapped it onto the object so it's streched vertically to simulate motion blur.

I animated the rain the same way like the ocean, the texture scrolls down the object.

I first used the model as billboard (like the trees you see at the horizon in Tres), which always face the player. While not moving this looks just fine but becomes very irritating as you come near and pass the object, it suddenly rotates away from you.

So I disabled that, now having a bunch of static planes. Looks pretty good in hardware mode, but looks like a big pixel mess in software.

So finally: yes we can do rain.

I'll perfect the method it and upload the model at TresCom.org.

[Rebel]

Redmul, have you considered a radius? Placing ingame, much the same as the ambient triggers, though with your rain drops spread outwards from the center?

Just a thought --

[Remdul]

Yep, came up in my mind too, but didn't test it because you often can't map them properly. But good thing you mentioned, I think I know a way this might work anyway, gonna test that now...

[Remdul]

Nope like I thought, didn't work out. Just could not map the texture right.

I took the 4 planes and put them together as a box, you can now move em around more easy in TresEd (they disapear all the time because the texure mipmaps). The more layers you have the more realistic the rain looks.

The only problem would be when you look up, you can see a the rain 'end'. But I got a good idea to fix that.

First a little intro;

A mesh is build up out of vertices. Each vertex has a normal, an invisible arrow which points in the direction the polygon (which connects the vertices) is facing. The game-engine's renderer uses this normal to determine the darkness of the vertex (colors in between vertices are interpolated to simulate lighting) when rendering each polygon.

If we set this normal to 1, it renders that corner of our polygon white, set it to 0 and it's black. Set it to 0.5 it's gray. Get it?

So if we set the normals at the top of our box to 0 (when having a black sky, 1 for a white sky or somethin else for anything in between) we can make the drops fade in as they come down.

Can do this with our TPM format, gonna test it. Did something like this before, but I'm not sure it works in Tres.


* not only the rain itself is important to make the whole effect work. Here's a screenie from the night testscene with a big skybox (almost white because of the fog):

http://home.planet.nl/~buijs512/trescom/rain2.jpg

Just gotta find the right combination with sky, fog and rain objects.
Rebel, is there a t-script value to disable fog on objects?

[Rebel]

Looks rather nifty, Redmul. Have you tried the bool Unlit? That might do it (stop the fog on object), though never tried --

[Remdul]

Yeah, tried it but didn't work. And it made the rain look bad, too bright.

Bumpmapped objects have different fog, maybe I can try some values of those.

As far as I know there is only one element that isn't rendered with fog; the particle effects. Doubt I can somehow make use of that...