Free asset proof of concept

OpenMW's very own demo, template and game to show off everything that OpenMW is capable of.

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psi29a
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by psi29a »

sjek wrote:Question is what kind of licence gamebryo's nif format has and is it bound to morrowind assets ?
File formats are not licensable.

If they were, then openoffice/libreoffice would be paying microsoft for their doc/docx formats.
K0kt409P
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by K0kt409P »

They are patentable though. Cfr. the mp3 situation.
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psi29a
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by psi29a »

K0kt409P wrote:They are patentable though. Cfr. the mp3 situation.
NIF isn't patented, yet. However, if that is the case:

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/ ... 32009L0024
(15) The unauthorised reproduction, translation, adaptation or transformation of the form of the code in which a copy of a computer program has been made available constitutes an infringement of the exclusive rights of the author. Nevertheless, circumstances may exist when such a reproduction of the code and translation of its form are indispensable to obtain the necessary information to achieve the interoperability of an independently created program with other programs. It has therefore to be considered that, in these limited circumstances only, performance of the acts of reproduction and translation by or on behalf of a person having a right to use a copy of the program is legitimate and compatible with fair practice and must therefore be deemed not to require the authorisation of the rightholder. An objective of this exception is to make it possible to connect all components of a computer system, including those of different manufacturers, so that they can work together. Such an exception to the author's exclusive rights may not be used in a way which prejudices the legitimate interests of the rightholder or which conflicts with a normal exploitation of the program.
Even then, reverse engineering of the NIF is still protected and exporting to NIF for use in other applications has never been problem in the past.

I think this is a none-issue. It is in gamebryo's best interest to see NIF support continued in Blender.
Tinker
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by Tinker »

Niftools, who are writing the Blender import/export tools is a bit of a mess, they are spread between Sourceforge and Git with lots of broken links. I found a recent import/export addon for blender which does not work in 2.73, spent most of the day in dependency hell sorting out Python libraries, at one time it looked like I needed to install a 3 year old wine version just to install a library.

At the moment they claim to support Oblivion, and Skyrim is on the todo list. It seems they do not support animations yet and probably will not this year judging by the rate of progress.
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johndh
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by johndh »

Since my original post, I've found a much better mocap library, created by the Ohio State Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, under similarly permissive terms. The animations seem much more natural and fluid with greater detail. The female set works great, but the other two sets (male #1 and male #2) give me error messages when I try to use them, which is a shame because male #2 has some fighting animations. I haven't had time to look into the problem to see if it is easily fixable or not. Maybe this weekend. :?

Here's an example of the better mocap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-LO_iArITU

The process of doing this is very quick and easy if you have basic familiarity with Blender and 3D principles in general. The hardest part is getting the form-fitting pieces of equipment to look right on the model. For the gauntlets, for example, I had to delete the leather parts and just copy the relevant geometry from the model's body, get the metal parts positioned correctly, then apply the leather texture to the new skin. The animations, on the other hand, are trivial to set up. My job is demanding about 50 to 60 hours per week from me, so I just haven't been able to sink a tremendous amount of time into it yet.

By the way, is there a specific license that y'all are aiming for, or that assets need to be compatible with? The MakeHuman and mocap data have no restrictions, but most of the weapons and armor I've found are under more restrictive (i.e. copyleft) terms.
psi29a wrote: Can it all be exported to NIF to be used directly in OpenMW?
I couldn't figure out how Niftools is/are supposed to work or even the proper installation location. There seems to be a shortage of documentation, or it's not readily discoverable (or I'm not good at finding it). I'll keep looking when I have some time, but it would be a big help if anybody can point me in the general right direction. So, a more direct answer to your question is that I have no idea yet.
Tinker wrote:Niftools, who are writing the Blender import/export tools is a bit of a mess, they are spread between Sourceforge and Git with lots of broken links. I found a recent import/export addon for blender which does not work in 2.73, spent most of the day in dependency hell sorting out Python libraries, at one time it looked like I needed to install a 3 year old wine version just to install a library.
My experience with that was also a big waste of time, so I sympathize.
Tinker wrote:The old nif exporter plugin might be tweakable to run under current blender
I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but I know when (Mega)Glest needed to update their exporter to work with newer versions of Blender, it was a lot more than a tweak. Apparently the scripting system of Blender 2.5 and later is a whole different animal than the one from 2.49. Supposedly the development version of Niftools is aimed at modern version of Blender, but it's my understanding that it's not really functional at the moment. Blender readily exports to a number of fairly standard formats, including many that include animations. One example is the Collada format (*.dae). The game 0 A.D. uses the Collada format for its meshes and separate Collada files for its animations. This allows different human characters to use the same set of animations, much like Morrowind does. It also has different characters made up of different meshes, each defined by a Collada file, so a group of functionally-identical hoplites might have different faces and hair styles, also much like Morrowind.
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sjek
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by sjek »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo , http://www.gamebryo.com/index.php it might be gamebryo's best interest to keep the support up and on that agree but as it's also modifiatable under licence.
circumstances may exist when such a reproduction of the code and translation of its form are indispensable to obtain the necessary information to achieve the interoperability of an independently created program with other programs.
aka. it's not indispensable to modify the files to get them working for blender so has to say that it's not possible to change the fileformat on that note + the mods that bethesda made to nif files might be under their IP

nevertheles emperorarthur was doing those nif templates before i hihjacked the skywind thread. i don't know if same kind of implementation is in place to the engine but it could be used to convert the files like with nif texture sparser changing the path from whole directory which would fulfill the above clause as indispensable althought this still would be little bit of a taste question in oldness of 4.0.0.2 and the new functions offered by ogre3d.

and the oblivion and nif files has bethesda made differences in their structure that it would be same as supporting three different file formats and i guess that those are all optimised for their engine mods.
I found a recent import/export addon for blender which does not work in 2.73, spent most of the day in dependency hell sorting out Python libraries, at one time it looked like I needed to install a 3 year old wine version just to install a library.
is it the official version as they dropped the morrowind support in some time .?

http://pyffi.sourceforge.net/pyffi.formats.nif.html
http://niftools.sourceforge.net/wiki/Niflib found this one but what all dependencies it needed ?

http://niftools.sourceforge.net/forum/v ... f=3&t=2726 2.5.05 should be morrowind combatible what the forums said.

and are they trying to make all versions of nif work in the one go and more importable is the blender file format how well documented as it would make making the import/export a lot easier ?

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=944 animated plants
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1272&p=12703&#p12703 liztail on niftools architecture
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=655 ogre cabalities
couch will be in use on the weekend xP

little more streamlined conversion also for vanilla
onionland
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by onionland »

Out of curiosity, if we were to go the route of making a custom exporter for the sake of Openmw, how possible would it be to store animations as an external xml file or the likes, and load it together with ogre models?
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johndh
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by johndh »

Since my original post, I've found a much better mocap library, created by the Ohio State Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, under similarly permissive terms. The animations seem much more natural and fluid with greater detail. The female set works great, but the other two sets (male #1 and male #2) give me error messages when I try to use them, which is a shame because male #2 has some fighting animations. I haven't had time to look into the problem to see if it is easily fixable or not. Maybe this weekend. :?

Here's an example of the better mocap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-LO_iArITU

The process of doing this is very quick and easy if you have basic familiarity with Blender and 3D principles in general. The hardest part is getting the form-fitting pieces of equipment to look right on the model. For the gauntlets, for example, I had to delete the leather parts and just copy the relevant geometry from the model's body, get the metal parts positioned correctly, then apply the leather texture to the new skin. The animations, on the other hand, are trivial to set up. My job is demanding about 50 to 60 hours per week from me, so I just haven't been able to sink a tremendous amount of time into it yet.

By the way, is there a specific license that y'all are aiming for, or that assets need to be compatible with? The MakeHuman and mocap data have no restrictions, but most of the weapons and armor I've found are under more restrictive (i.e. copyleft) terms.
psi29a wrote: Can it all be exported to NIF to be used directly in OpenMW?
I couldn't figure out how Niftools is/are supposed to work or even the proper installation location. There seems to be a shortage of documentation, or it's not readily discoverable (or I'm not good at finding it). I'll keep looking when I have some time, but it would be a big help if anybody can point me in the general right direction. So, a more direct answer to your question is that I have no idea yet.
Tinker wrote:Niftools, who are writing the Blender import/export tools is a bit of a mess, they are spread between Sourceforge and Git with lots of broken links. I found a recent import/export addon for blender which does not work in 2.73, spent most of the day in dependency hell sorting out Python libraries, at one time it looked like I needed to install a 3 year old wine version just to install a library.
My experience with that was also a big waste of time, so I sympathize.
Tinker wrote:The old nif exporter plugin might be tweakable to run under current blender
I'm not a programmer by any stretch, but I know when (Mega)Glest needed to update their exporter to work with newer versions of Blender, it was a lot more than a tweak. Apparently the scripting system of Blender 2.5 and later is a whole different animal than the one from 2.49. Supposedly the development version of Niftools is aimed at modern version of Blender, but it's my understanding that it's not really functional at the moment. Blender readily exports to a number of fairly standard formats, including many that include animations. One example is the Collada format (*.dae). The game 0 A.D. uses the Collada format for its meshes and separate Collada files for its animations. This allows different human characters to use the same set of animations, much like Morrowind does. It also has different characters made up of different meshes, each defined by a Collada file, so a group of functionally-identical hoplites might have different faces and hair styles, also much like Morrowind.

(Sorry if this is a double-post. I didn't get any kind of confirmation previously, so I don't know if it worked.)
Tinker
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by Tinker »

As I understand it niftools blender exporter addon will only work with an obsolete version of Blender and an obsolete version of Python and it seems only with 32 bit versions as well.

If you actually get it to work, that is show up in Blender export list, you get to choose what nif version you are exporting to, so you can choose Morrowind, but they have not written the animation export yet so you just get a static model and material.

The preceding facts may well be wrong but that is the best information I could find from niftools sites, in any case it seems as if any hope of using Blender to create nif assets sometime this decade is almost zero. I am not aware of any Open Source software that can create nif files so asset development might be restricted to windows users who have a lot of cash to spend on commercial products.

The Collada route looks promising as Blender to Collada and Collada to Ogre seem to work but OpenMW would need to add support for Collada, in any case restricting OpenMW to only using the Morrowind version of nif is going to be restrictive in the long term.
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Re: Free asset proof of concept

Post by psi29a »

Tinker wrote:The Collada route looks promising as Blender to Collada and Collada to Ogre seem to work but OpenMW would need to add support for Collada, in any case restricting OpenMW to only using the Morrowind version of nif is going to be restrictive in the long term.
This or a similar route is best.

Build it, and they will come. :)

We could also probably use some of the Collada models/animations from 0AD for proof of concept.
0 A.D. supports the ​COLLADA format for importing new models into the game, whether static or animated. A number of 3D modeling suites support COLLADA, but only a few are used in practice and have been confirmed to work with the game:

​3DS Max: commercial, professional-quality suite.
​Blender: free, open source alternative. COLLADA support varies from one version to another, we recommend 2.6+ for animations.
http://play0ad.com/community/participate/
Like the codebase, 0 A.D’s art is also “open source”. The models and animations can be created in the software of your choice, as long as it capable of exporting COLLADA files (.DAE). Similarly, the 2D textures are exported though the paint software of your choice to a Direct Draw Surface (.DDS) file. The alpha channel of the texture is used to define player color, object color, or transparency.

The art assets are organized in XML files called ‘actors’, which define entities in the game. An actor declares callouts for models, textures, and animations, if applicable. Since you can specify alternate textures and props to an entity, you can use the 0 A.D. art model to allow for randomness in the art. That way, several instances of the same Celtic warrior could appear in battle with variant hair colors, and two adjacent instances of the same Greek house could have pots and carpets aligned differently, so they’ll seldom look exactly alike.

Templates to help you make art assets (like textures and meshes) are readily available. Also, various tutorials and guides will allow you to hit the ground running. More information about the nuts and bolts of creating art assets for 0 A.D. can be found here. Check out our open art development forum, and feel free to participate!
http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/ArtDesignDocument
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