[quote=“Runiat, post:277, topic:524”]
Probably something to do with this:[quote]That’s honestly the only thing I wanted to see in this video, and it was cut.[/quote][/quote]
This was a video about 1-1 scale rings in an engine built to handle seamless transitions. The seamless transitions into/out of the rings was the only thing I wanted to see from the video. It was cut from the recorded footage. This is the most neutral statement I could have possibly made in regards to my feelings about the video.
Except the earth-like-planet video was FREAKING AWESOME!
The ring video makes it look like the engine lacks one of its key selling points. I refuse to believe that I-Novae would intentionally make something they’ve spent so much time and worked so hard on look bad on purpose. Which leaves ‘a problem with the engine’ or ‘an oversight with the video.’ I’m guessing the 2nd reason, but it annoys me that the video even hints toward the first.
The video is pointless as a marketing tool. Other games are in development with better graphics, other games have 1-1 scale space (something this video didn’t do so well at showing off).
I honestly don’t feel that many people are going to notice it’s existence (doubt many of those who do will care) beyond those already following the project. All those people have seen better from I-Novae.
We didn’t want to make another 5+ minutes video. It was supposed to be a relatively short video ( and I still think it’s too long for what it is ). You can’t have seamless transitions from planet to ring, showing asteroids and stuff, within 2 minutes.
In addition, the camera path curves were done in 3ds max since we are experimenting with the workflow for the KS. The asteroids procedural generation happens in engine, and you can’t easily export that data to 3ds max ( since by definition it’s procedural, so it’s not static data ). That’d make it pretty hard to make a curve that’d show some individual asteroids.
But then the path data would have to be imported into the engine not into 3dmax.
I don’t understand why you would make paths in 3dmax. Is this not a primary part of the engine?
At least if you would want to move in it which is pretty basic. I am somewhat confused.
Ofcourse you can move in-engine. But to create the cinematic feel people are used to from movie- and game-trailers, you need to define camera paths to create smooth pans, have camera-easing, let the camera move in a certain direction, etc.
I guess that can be done more easily in software like 3Dsmax at this time, which just generates movement data that can be used in-engine.
If you have no planets in 3dmax how can you move correctly in it. You are basically blind. I mean spline interpolation is pretty easy to build, why use 3dmax for such an simple thing if it causes so much issues in processing afterwards. It all very strange and confusing to me.
All you need to know are the coordinates, inclination, and the relevant radii to generate the camera curves in 3DS Max. Then you get to program all of your camera’s motions in a suite designed for cinematic camera motions and export the camera’s script when you’re done.
That’s probably a lot easier than programming your own camera in engine.
I don’t know where people are seeing this so called “popping” action. If you look closely then you’ll notice the smaller asteroids are advancing by at a much higher rate because, well, they’re smaller than the largest ones. The more larger asteroids are able to be seen coming from a very far distance. What needs to be taken into consideration is the speed at which the camera was moving. Think about it! If your ship is moving at a high rate of speed then you’re not going to have the time to comprehend and acknowledge each and every individual asteroid as they pass.
The one thing I can agree on with some of you is the perception of scale these asteroids are in terms of dimension. This of course will be negated after things like ships and stations are placed.
For the future, it would probably be beneficial to implement some sort of model export feature in the engine, so you could load up something in 3ds max to help with camera movement.
I figure it takes, what, 30 seconds to put a sphere and a torus into 3Dsmax?
Lets assume the video update frequency is increased by several orders of magnitude, to once per month, that the devs want all those videos to be with preplanned paths (rather than in-game spacecraft), and that the Kickstarter is still 5 years off.
So to save time by implementing preplanned paths in the engine you’d have to do it in…
30 minutes. Yeah. No. That wont work.
As mentioned, a (few) sphere(s) and a torus is really all you need to know where to move the camera in this video. Sure, it wont let you fly up to an individual asteroid… but then I really don’t think 3Dsmax would like it if you imported 5 billion high-poly, procedurally generated asteroids to it.
Even if it could handle the load, I don’t suppose 3Dsmax uses the same orbital physics as the INovae engine.
Actually, we can do that already with the planet geometry, but not with the asteroids in the rings.
Game engines such as UE4 and CE3 have “cinematic modes” which is where they create such videos, we do not have that yet, hence the reason we are utilizing MAX to create the cameras & splines. In the future, one of many goals is to have a cinematic mode in INE.
Was the rings video rendered in 3dmax and is that why planetary landing was not possible in it?
Where the meteorites added using after effects?
Is this why the video looks so different from other movies that have been shown of the engine.
Where videos made using 3dmax in the past?
That doesn’t solve any problem. The asteroids / ring is procedurally generated. Which means the geometry that the renderer generates is valid for a single viewpoint. If you move the camera 100 Km away, you get a totally different scene, with different asteroids placement, density, etc…
In order to export the ring to 3ds max, you’d somehow have to generate thousands of scenes along the camera curve/path. But you don’t even have a camera curve/path to start with, that’s the whole point of making it in 3ds max. So it’s a chicken vs egg problem…
One solution would be to generate billions of random viewpoints in the ring, for each of those export the geometry; then “merge” all this geometry together, and import the resulting static scene in 3ds max. There are probably trillions of asteroids in that ring, which means that data wise, it wouldn’t even fit on a TB hard drive.
@Asimo: no, the video was recorded in engine. Only the camera paths/curves were designed in 3ds max.
Wouldn’t it be helpful, to add a hidden-feature into the engine, which allows to push position-anchor-points to a stack? That way, the engine could interpolate between those points in realtime and you would more or less design the camera-spline in the engine without any complicated spline-editor…
You don’t need the entire asteroid field. Just get a grab of the asteroids in one spot, and use that to adjust the camera path for that portion to go close to some of the asteroids, or maybe a space station in there.
We have that ofc, and it does the job for a quick & dirty work, but that wasn’t what the artists wanted. You have no way to edit the curve, add/remove points, rework portions, etc…
It looks absolutely stunning, Flavien. Keep it up! Your engine is ready when you feel it’s ready. Once it’s done, it’ll knock anything else out of the water.
