Over the last few days I've been working on a guide on how to split patches, it's almost complete and is up on the DarkMod wiki.
You can find it here: Here

EXAMPLE:
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/7826 ... atches.png

*crickets*

Is there really no interest in this? I always thought that this was something worth knowing. :?:

Seems like a good find

, but I honestly never felt the need to split a patch.
I'd reather recreate it from scratch than massing with the file... but I guess it depends on how complex the patch is.

Anyway, good to know it can be done.
Thanks for this.

This isn't something I ever felt a need to do, however that could be because it never seemed possible. Could you give an example of how you have used this ability, to go to such difficulty to do so you must be planning something tricky.

Tron wrote:

This isn't something I ever felt a need to do, however that could be because it never seemed possible. Could you give an example of how you have used this ability, to go to such difficulty to do so you must be planning something tricky.

Well in my example, I used gensurf to create a giant cave with huge patches to keep the number down, and yes they have a complicated shape.
Here is a screenshot in game of just the cave: http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/2402/shot00002w.jpg

As you can see, recreating one of those patches by hand in smaller pieces is not going to happen, and I don't have the greyscale heightmap anymore so I can't recreate the patches in smaller pieces. So I thought I was SOL, so I started poking around in the map file and found a a way to split the patches.

Ivan_the_B wrote:

Seems like a good find

, but I honestly never felt the need to split a patch.
I'd reather recreate it from scratch than massing with the file... but I guess it depends on how complex the patch is.

Anyway, good to know it can be done.
Thanks for this.

Well I know the tutorial looks complicated, but honestly after you do it for the first time, it takes literally 2 minutes if that. It's copy/paste, delete, delete, and save and you have your patch split down the middle.

AluminumHaste wrote:

Well in my example, I used gensurf to create a giant cave with huge patches to keep the number down, and yes they have a complicated shape.
Here is a screenshot in game of just the cave: http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/2402/shot00002w.jpg

That is SICK, but awesome at the same time.

Well here's the rest of it so far:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/4937/shot00006pf.jpg

AluminumHaste wrote:

Well here's the rest of it so far:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/4937/shot00006pf.jpg

My goodness! :shock:

I can see it's for the Dark Mod.

I can see the usefuleness of this. But I wonder about your application, couldn't you use a 3d package to make this mesh.
Are there benefits to using patches over meshes exported from 3d programs?
why don't you start with more 3x3 patches and line them up as you go?
Sorry for all the questions, but this method confuses me.

That is a terrible, terrible way to do things. You are using so many polygons to do so little detail, I cant see why you would want to waste resources that way. it makes much more sense to take that as a base mesh, get it into zbrush or Mudbox, sculpt your terrain/cave, render a low poly version of it (with sub-d grid), vertex paint, optimise mesh so that you dont have wasted polygons where you dont need them (Where it wont change the shape, and the blend), and then render a normal map onto this low polygon mesh.

What you are doing is to be honest, a quicker way, but it will produce some seriously ugly visuals with smoothing seams all over the place, and thats before the performance issue of wasting so many polygons comes into play. Theres nothing wrong with using what you have done as a base mesh to start you off, but come on man, take it to the next level like it should be.

EDIT: Ouch its even worse than I thought. In your second pic, you dont even use any form of blending, and its all pitch black, making all of that detail totally pointless anyway... Seems a really oldschool way of doing things. I'm guessing you have no experience with 3d modelling and thats why you had to hack it that way?

I don't really think the post/thread was intended for comments on a WIP map, more just to share the idea of splitting a patch.

That said, patches get a lot of undue hate from some people. While they may not be the be all and end all of making something like a cave, they allow people who are not experienced with modeling apps (majority of TDM mappers) to knock up something half decent that is easily adjustable and doesn't require any outside workflow. The performance difference in most cases is quite negligible assuming you're using the sweet spot in fixed subdivision.

While there's no doubt using a static mesh would be the best idea for looks, it's just not feasible most of the time due to tool selection being a large limiting factor, there's no easy tool to export back and forth between DR while preserving texture names and such. At the end of the day most people just don't 'get' Blender, commercial tools are out of the question and wings3D doesn't have an ASE exporter (setting up materials is a pain for lwo export). Your point about material blending is about the only point in which modeling it is really important... mostly due to patches not supporting vertex colouring and subsequently any form or method of doing this.

So really, when it all comes down to which method is best, it's something that really has to be decided when you're entering entering player testing and have concerns about performance or arn't happy with the looks.

tl;dr the weights of both pros and cons on models vs. patches are hard to weigh up and theres really no true clear cut best.

well, patches have the benefit of being versatile in the editor, and that can save a lot of time. That being said, they can be temperamental when trying to make something like this cave. and should this person ever have to resize this cave, the time saved using patches will be quickly negated.
I'm not sure you really need all the hassle of using a high poly model here, while that would be nice, really all you need is a model with the basic shape of the cave and some decent rock textures. I wish there were better/more available tools to make .ase's, but a lack of 3d know-how is really the only reason to be using patches for terrain.

I like that tree.

A little trick I picked up (that nobody ever directly said because it's so obvious): I found I can do more with patches then I can in a 3D app (until I started using skinning & using patched in blender.

), but then I figured out that you can use radient to get your basic layout & then use the 3d app to do all the detail work, even make an exact copy of what you want & have it look BETTER!

All versions of radiant now have a .obj exporter. Export your cave (and tree I'm assuming is patches too)to a .obj then import it in to blender (0 scale, disable the -90 rotate). Now you've got your mesh in blender. Now you can reduce the poly's & texture UV unwrap it to get the exact look you're after. The exported stuff should be offset in the .obj right where it was in the editor, so if you export your model it should be all set to go!

However.... D3's per-poly doesn't do more then a set # of sides for static model model collision so I'd recommend you use clip brushes in the editor to give your cave collision.

It looks nice but like said, it's so dark you can't see any detail anyway.

You might as well just use a curved dome instead, would give you a big performance increase.

Serpentine wrote:

Your point about material blending is about the only point in which modeling it is really important... mostly due to patches not supporting vertex colouring and subsequently any form or method of doing this.

That's not entirely true, we've gotten some great results by using decals.

BloodRayne wrote:

That's not entirely true, we've gotten some great results by using decals.

That's still a workaround!

But still, if your decals have soft blended edges and still react to lighting, it'd be interesting to see one of the defs. I myself have only put a few hours into trying to make edge blends, but without double layers I couldn't figure it out, Fid also didn't have much luck... just ugly ass hard alpha edges

To address concerns about this map, yes I could have exported to a 3d modeling program, they're not that hard to get into as there's some excellent tutorials around. There are several cons with using models.

The first and the biggest, is that if the entire top half of the cave were a model, any visportals inside the bounds of the model would not close, and anything inside the cave, such as the tree and everything in it, would also be rendered.
I already tried this when the entire cave was a single func_static. I had built a shed hanging in the air with a visportaled door and in game even with the door closed, I turned on r_showtris 2 and you can see the cave is being rendered still.

Also the physics engine would shit it's pants. That many polies being tested at once because it's a single object, would slow the game to a crawl.

The tree is a model (about 40,000 triangles I believe), made using a tree generator (shhh, don't tell them where I got it) I had to export it into 3DStudioMax, took quite a bit of work to figure that one out.

What I have at the moment is I've grouped 4 patches together into a func_static, and this gave me the best performance vs visuals. Also I've tweaked the manual subdivisions. I've also toyed with the idea that I could reduce the subdivisions of the patches in permanent shadow really low, and keep the rest around 8x8 or such.

Over the last few days I've been working on a guide on how to split patches, it's almost complete and is up on the DarkMod wiki.
You can find it here: Here

EXAMPLE:
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/7826 ... atches.png

*crickets*

Is there really no interest in this? I always thought that this was something worth knowing. :?:

Seems like a good find

, but I honestly never felt the need to split a patch.
I'd reather recreate it from scratch than massing with the file... but I guess it depends on how complex the patch is.

Anyway, good to know it can be done.
Thanks for this.

This isn't something I ever felt a need to do, however that could be because it never seemed possible. Could you give an example of how you have used this ability, to go to such difficulty to do so you must be planning something tricky.

Tron wrote:

This isn't something I ever felt a need to do, however that could be because it never seemed possible. Could you give an example of how you have used this ability, to go to such difficulty to do so you must be planning something tricky.

Well in my example, I used gensurf to create a giant cave with huge patches to keep the number down, and yes they have a complicated shape.
Here is a screenshot in game of just the cave: http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/2402/shot00002w.jpg

As you can see, recreating one of those patches by hand in smaller pieces is not going to happen, and I don't have the greyscale heightmap anymore so I can't recreate the patches in smaller pieces. So I thought I was SOL, so I started poking around in the map file and found a a way to split the patches.

Ivan_the_B wrote:

Seems like a good find

, but I honestly never felt the need to split a patch.
I'd reather recreate it from scratch than massing with the file... but I guess it depends on how complex the patch is.

Anyway, good to know it can be done.
Thanks for this.

Well I know the tutorial looks complicated, but honestly after you do it for the first time, it takes literally 2 minutes if that. It's copy/paste, delete, delete, and save and you have your patch split down the middle.

AluminumHaste wrote:

Well in my example, I used gensurf to create a giant cave with huge patches to keep the number down, and yes they have a complicated shape.
Here is a screenshot in game of just the cave: http://img46.imageshack.us/img46/2402/shot00002w.jpg

That is SICK, but awesome at the same time.

Well here's the rest of it so far:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/4937/shot00006pf.jpg

AluminumHaste wrote:

Well here's the rest of it so far:

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/4937/shot00006pf.jpg

My goodness! :shock:

I can see it's for the Dark Mod.

I can see the usefuleness of this. But I wonder about your application, couldn't you use a 3d package to make this mesh.
Are there benefits to using patches over meshes exported from 3d programs?
why don't you start with more 3x3 patches and line them up as you go?
Sorry for all the questions, but this method confuses me.

That is a terrible, terrible way to do things. You are using so many polygons to do so little detail, I cant see why you would want to waste resources that way. it makes much more sense to take that as a base mesh, get it into zbrush or Mudbox, sculpt your terrain/cave, render a low poly version of it (with sub-d grid), vertex paint, optimise mesh so that you dont have wasted polygons where you dont need them (Where it wont change the shape, and the blend), and then render a normal map onto this low polygon mesh.

What you are doing is to be honest, a quicker way, but it will produce some seriously ugly visuals with smoothing seams all over the place, and thats before the performance issue of wasting so many polygons comes into play. Theres nothing wrong with using what you have done as a base mesh to start you off, but come on man, take it to the next level like it should be.

EDIT: Ouch its even worse than I thought. In your second pic, you dont even use any form of blending, and its all pitch black, making all of that detail totally pointless anyway... Seems a really oldschool way of doing things. I'm guessing you have no experience with 3d modelling and thats why you had to hack it that way?

I don't really think the post/thread was intended for comments on a WIP map, more just to share the idea of splitting a patch.

That said, patches get a lot of undue hate from some people. While they may not be the be all and end all of making something like a cave, they allow people who are not experienced with modeling apps (majority of TDM mappers) to knock up something half decent that is easily adjustable and doesn't require any outside workflow. The performance difference in most cases is quite negligible assuming you're using the sweet spot in fixed subdivision.

While there's no doubt using a static mesh would be the best idea for looks, it's just not feasible most of the time due to tool selection being a large limiting factor, there's no easy tool to export back and forth between DR while preserving texture names and such. At the end of the day most people just don't 'get' Blender, commercial tools are out of the question and wings3D doesn't have an ASE exporter (setting up materials is a pain for lwo export). Your point about material blending is about the only point in which modeling it is really important... mostly due to patches not supporting vertex colouring and subsequently any form or method of doing this.

So really, when it all comes down to which method is best, it's something that really has to be decided when you're entering entering player testing and have concerns about performance or arn't happy with the looks.

tl;dr the weights of both pros and cons on models vs. patches are hard to weigh up and theres really no true clear cut best.

well, patches have the benefit of being versatile in the editor, and that can save a lot of time. That being said, they can be temperamental when trying to make something like this cave. and should this person ever have to resize this cave, the time saved using patches will be quickly negated.
I'm not sure you really need all the hassle of using a high poly model here, while that would be nice, really all you need is a model with the basic shape of the cave and some decent rock textures. I wish there were better/more available tools to make .ase's, but a lack of 3d know-how is really the only reason to be using patches for terrain.

I like that tree.

A little trick I picked up (that nobody ever directly said because it's so obvious): I found I can do more with patches then I can in a 3D app (until I started using skinning & using patched in blender.

), but then I figured out that you can use radient to get your basic layout & then use the 3d app to do all the detail work, even make an exact copy of what you want & have it look BETTER!

All versions of radiant now have a .obj exporter. Export your cave (and tree I'm assuming is patches too)to a .obj then import it in to blender (0 scale, disable the -90 rotate). Now you've got your mesh in blender. Now you can reduce the poly's & texture UV unwrap it to get the exact look you're after. The exported stuff should be offset in the .obj right where it was in the editor, so if you export your model it should be all set to go!

However.... D3's per-poly doesn't do more then a set # of sides for static model model collision so I'd recommend you use clip brushes in the editor to give your cave collision.

It looks nice but like said, it's so dark you can't see any detail anyway.

You might as well just use a curved dome instead, would give you a big performance increase.

Serpentine wrote:

Your point about material blending is about the only point in which modeling it is really important... mostly due to patches not supporting vertex colouring and subsequently any form or method of doing this.

That's not entirely true, we've gotten some great results by using decals.

BloodRayne wrote:

That's not entirely true, we've gotten some great results by using decals.

That's still a workaround!

But still, if your decals have soft blended edges and still react to lighting, it'd be interesting to see one of the defs. I myself have only put a few hours into trying to make edge blends, but without double layers I couldn't figure it out, Fid also didn't have much luck... just ugly ass hard alpha edges

To address concerns about this map, yes I could have exported to a 3d modeling program, they're not that hard to get into as there's some excellent tutorials around. There are several cons with using models.

The first and the biggest, is that if the entire top half of the cave were a model, any visportals inside the bounds of the model would not close, and anything inside the cave, such as the tree and everything in it, would also be rendered.
I already tried this when the entire cave was a single func_static. I had built a shed hanging in the air with a visportaled door and in game even with the door closed, I turned on r_showtris 2 and you can see the cave is being rendered still.

Also the physics engine would shit it's pants. That many polies being tested at once because it's a single object, would slow the game to a crawl.

The tree is a model (about 40,000 triangles I believe), made using a tree generator (shhh, don't tell them where I got it) I had to export it into 3DStudioMax, took quite a bit of work to figure that one out.

What I have at the moment is I've grouped 4 patches together into a func_static, and this gave me the best performance vs visuals. Also I've tweaked the manual subdivisions. I've also toyed with the idea that I could reduce the subdivisions of the patches in permanent shadow really low, and keep the rest around 8x8 or such.