So, to do some showcase videos and demos we purchased a small library of village models from a professional modeling company and lo and behold… They work just fine in jME3
The actual models are all nice clean meshes with as few vertices as possible with diffuse, normal, specular and even oldschool bump maps. The maps for most houses actually use all the same texture atlas which exists in two versions so you can “skin” your houses as well as batch multiple houses easily (because they all use the same texture atlas).
After the first import it became quickly apparent that you’d only have to create two j3m files for one or the other material and it works for all houses then. So you can quickly assign textures (even new ones with the same layout) in the properties window of the SDK.
So they modeled the houses and then set the texture coordinates according to the atlas afterwards instead of painting on the texture. This is an approach we suggest as well and I will use this opportunity of having such great example material (which still needed some work after the first import) to make the next “use case” video about models, model import, modeling and scene editing
…just as an impression for what you can get out of jME very quickly with some pro assets (thanks @destroflyer for putting the scene together):
Cheers,
Normen
That is just beautiful.
It is actually amazing what a scene can look like if you have professional modelers that now what they do and the fact that it fits so easily into jME3 is even a bigger bonus.
That is some serious modeling.
Well done.
That looks good =) Professional assets is key to good looking game!
There are some artistic tweaks that can be done to the post processing filters though. That blooming green water looks awful, like chemical waste…
The night scene could be a little brighter and then given a blue tint, or wash out the colors instead.
And if this would be a game, then a subtle highlight on jaime would be great. Some rimlight and/or a different color ramp… just enough to make him pop out =)
I realize this is just thrown together though, and that you have not had countless of hours tweaking params yet =P
Yep, they were still working out what all the various textures that came with the pack were for last night
I expect we can see a lot of improvement in this scene over time. The water looks better from other angles - it’s just near the land it goes so neon and this camera angle happened to highlight that.
Wow, that looks spectacular. The price is not bad for that package either, 30 euro, on an indie licence. I thought models like this were significantly more, nice to know…
Wow, a little more vegetation and some work on the water (in daylight) and maybe another character in the scene and it would look like skyrim. Maybe a lil bird seen far away, in the sky.
So many people having wondered if bad graphics were due to the engine make it a very wise move to show that nope, nothing to do with it.
Yep, q.e.d.: “Its all in the assets”
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Yeah, the water has this ugly green tone only at the shore, maybe I can play around with the foam settings/texture to get rid of it - Those are the results on my pc:
I’ll look into this decent blue overlay in the dark style of the scene, thanks for the hint.
Unfortunately, we weren’t able to convert all of the vegetation that came with the assets pack (For me only mushrooms, stones and gras at the moment), but I’m sure we find the issue with the trees etc. soon.
@nihal said:
Wow, that looks spectacular. The price is not bad for that package either, 30 euro, on an indie licence. I thought models like this were significantly more, nice to know...
Exclusive models are expensive as you have to pay the full development cost. Shared models are much more reasonable but they could pop up in anyone’s game and they reduce the uniqueness of yours…
@nihal said:
Wow, that looks spectacular. The price is not bad for that package either, 30 euro, on an indie licence. I thought models like this were significantly more, nice to know...
Yeah, like zarch explained, it's unfortunately not quite that simple. I've been looking all over the place for professional grade creative commons (or similarly permissive) licensed assets, but it is practically impossible.
I’ve been e-mailing the Dexsoft guys back and forth for weeks, and they just won’t budge. We’ve offered to only redistribute their assets under our own .j3o format, including a strict license (and even unobtrusive advertisement for Dexsoft) so the assets would be for demo use only - see, that way you guys could download these scenes yourselves and play around with them. You still couldn’t use them in your own projects, but you could still learn a lot, right? - but for some reason they don’t like the idea of thousands of monkeys experimenting with great looking assets with their name on it…
If someone can figure out how we can make a plugin or any other kind of redistributable that complies with their license, let me know: http://www.dexsoft-games.com/models/indie.txt
