[MOD] Voxel Daggerfall

[theAndrewJeff]

Great work shown thus far! I have some 3D experience in modeling in Blender. I doubt I have the time (and energy, frankly) to do full character modeling, but if there are smaller creatures and items I'd be interested in helping out in any way if I can!

[Mortecha]

Great work shown thus far! I have some 3D experience in modeling in Blender. I doubt I have the time (and energy, frankly) to do full character modeling, but if there are smaller creatures and items I'd be interested in helping out in any way if I can!

I would love the help!! I have no problems accepting models to voxelize and any help is more than welcome. Feel free to make what ever you like or feel you most want to see made. I'll happily voxelize it and include it in the mod, with credits etc.

[jayhova]

her hips are wider than her shoulders

[l3lessed]

Great work shown thus far! I have some 3D experience in modeling in Blender. I doubt I have the time (and energy, frankly) to do full character modeling, but if there are smaller creatures and items I'd be interested in helping out in any way if I can!

Any help would be wonderful; Numerous people have been wanting and on 3d models on and off for a long time. One of the issues is setting up a proper animation system, once the models are done and textured, and the animator makes the animations.

To do this, some one needs to provide the models, the individual animations, and then those animations need to be coded in to control the model properly and play them smoothly.

I began work on that for the models from "Varied 3D faithful Animals" a few years ago, and got a basic system setup, before I had to abandon it because of things going on in my life. Sadly, I didn't backup the animation script, so it would need rebuilt from scratch. I still have the models, animations, and textures, along with the prefabs and scripts to load the models with unique textures. it's all on my github though, just no animation scripting.

As an example, for the 3d horses and animations I was provided, I had to setup a animation play code, setup a area for them to wonder, and setup sphere casting codes to check what things were in there way, like buildings. I got it working in a very basic way, with them walking in an area, detecting if buildings where in their way and stopping near them, but there was bugs still appearing I didn't get sorted out. This is the same for weapons; however, I already have a raycasting system setup that could easily be hooked up to 3d weapon models because of my ambidexterity mod.

[MasonFace]

How do you plan to render these voxels in engine? I've been out of the loop regarding Unity engine for so long that I'm not sure if it has a native voxel renderer from within DFU.

[Mortecha]

Sorry for the late reply, and thank you all for your time and interest in my work so far. I hope to have some more progress to show soon.

Regarding animations, the different models would need to be boned properly, just to then be posed to match the frames and frame numbers of the original sprites.

After the model has been posed to a specific frame, the lighting then gets baked into the texture and then that model then gets converted into a voxel.

Regarding rendering the voxels in the engine, they wont actually be voxels I don't think as its also an option just to make them 3d models again, only if the final result can be cleaned up automatically, but I still haven't decided which path to best take.

[l3lessed]

Wishing you luck. I'm curious how you plan to move the animations into the engine itself though? Unless there is something different from when I tried, this will require building scripts from scratch to import this all in and run it. However, I didn't try this with enemies with animation sets already in place. I was doing it with the static animals in the towns. Is it as simple as replacing the original sprite based animation triggers with a prepackaged unity animation compiled into the mod, so it triggers when the original sprite animation runs?

[Mortecha]

Thanks l3lessed,

I'm probably not going to attempt implementing it for a while and I'll begin by saying I don't have all of the answers yet, and won't for a while either.

I also only have a speculative rough idea in my mind for now for how I'm going to implement the animations. There are a number of ways I can do it, and there would also need to be alot of experimentation to find the right solution because I suspect there would be pros and cons for each way.

Regardless of how its implemented, it would involve a new way that sits alongside the current way that sprites currently work and would work similarly to how the function calls are currently used to change the sprites frame. In fact it wouldn't be too dissimilar to how JohnDoom's Animator Framework works and I may even be able to just use it to save time.

I'm also very open to the idea of working with someone or any number of people who know much more about this than I do.

I'm hoping to having an animated preview of that spellsword ready shortly, I estimate by Sunday or MondayXD