Nothing happened, yet. No one has contributed anything yet. I must admit I had expected more of you guys.
we are lazy. I did a sail boat no?
Yes, it is awesome 
hey watch out the words treeform, I’m not lazy, I just sucks at 3d modelling! 
besides, I missed the sailboat, where it is?
It’s in the new ‘Distortion’ sample.
have to wait 1.6 then
Hey I just found this post. Yes, I agree with what a lot of other people have said, Panda3D could do with some better models to show off a bit better. My first impression of the engine when I saw it (6 months ago) was -wow, I can do stuff like that in only that many lines!!! -But I was put off by the eye-candy (or lack thereof).
I’m a programmer, but I can do modeling of non-animated objects (?terrain) well enough. I’m also getting better at texture creation. If someone wanted to point me in a specific direction (which model to re-do) I could have a shot at it - just so long as I don’t have to do any animation!
I’ve just started first semester of Uni, so I’m busy, but I’d love to help.
-Aaron
I’d love to help out with producing artwork, but I’m very new to Panda3D. The biggest thing that has been troubling me as a designer and artist is that the documentation for the use of tools, well, sucks. Panda3D seems to have a heck of a lot of potential to me, but just taking a quick glance at the manual spells out the issues - “II. Programming with Panda” is huge but “VIII. Panda Tools” is dinky and lackluster. The 3ds Max exporter is largely unsupported (which sucks seeing as how it is the predominant application used by professional game artists, followed close behind by Maya) and the level editor (which it looks like pro-rsoft is working on) isn’t at a usable state yet. Panda3D appears (to me) to be fantastic from a programmer’s perspective, but for the artist or designer there is a lot needed.
For instance, if I wanted to build a terrain for use in Panda, what are my options and what is the workflow? If I wanted to place entities onto that terrain, what are my options? Does all of this have to be done programmatically or are there available tools for these? The manual doesn’t cover these.
Also, Panda3D 1.6 was mentioned - what is the target date for it? What are the intended features?
For terrain, there’s this manual page:
panda3d.org/manual/index.php?title=Terrain
For the 1.6.0 features:
panda3d.cvs.sourceforge.net/view … iew=markup
There’s not really a release date yet (but it will be here in a month, I hope)
Thanks for the terrain link, but I think you kind of missed the point. That page talks about those terrain generation classes for programmers. If I click on the HeightfieldTesselator link I get the info I need as an artist, but the Geometric MipMapping link is not exactly what I would call artist friendly.
The point was that it is very intimidating (and thus will deter away a lot of artists) to have to dig through all of the programming sections to find the information to do what they do best - make the artwork. I mean, does it really make sense for an artist to dig through programming articles to find the information that is pertinent to them as artists?
I’m not trying to be negative here, but this is a definite weak point I see in the documentation that if fixed would help a lot of potential artists. I think the concept of Panda3D is awesome; it is just VERY programmer centric.
We would certainly be happy to accept your help.
What you do need to realise though is Panda is not a game creation kit - it seems strongly biased towards programmers because it is. Reality is you can not make a game using it without programming - the manual is in fact very good, but only if your in the target audience. The reason all of this typically doesn’t matter is when stuck the artist just asks the programmer, assuming they are not the same person.
Thanks for the links. Its like night and day on this end.
Hello friends, this is a fantastic idea, to get more reallistic the tutorial demo, Panda 3D can do at least 10 times better a game than that tutorial… i’m sure can be fixed “cameralens” 19º or radius of radian to 1.4 so, its will lets rendering not to be like orthograph look.
I’m a designer, code for me is new, but i guess i can submit a little help in this case, I has been studying the textures (no matter the engine, no matter if it is low or high poly), one of the most important thing to take in mind at the moment to operate a texture are two things, the saturation and the contrast, easy you can note that satured color textures are not reallistic, btw, you can use The Gimp to satureless (30%) and get contrast up (30%), this will get a better looking image and… of course, if you apply normal maps, you can get a 90% perfect vision of the game, for example, games like BattleField, Silent Hill, TombRaider, Call of Duty, those game has nothing really good except textures and shadders, some of them uses lightmaps…, Panda 3D can do those games too, i’m sure, and with a good speed, the trick is to get shadders, dynamic lights (or lightmaps is ok), and efficient textures, the first condition depends exlusively from Panda, the second one depends of some techniques, and Panda has those habilities, then you can do a great game with it.
Look the difference between :
and now this one (the same but satureless + contrast up + normalmaps)
Is a good technic isn’t ?
I have an ambiental sound scheme, but is more oriented for a cloudy day, the wind… can download http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UOBUYX52
could be great if we (as a community) implement a tutorial system with this implementations:
Like a cooking book : (this is an idea, only, so feel free to implement or not or talk about it)
- Tutorial : How to set an environment and actors with Panda 3D
Materials :
- Download actor here (panda mesh , panda.egg.pz)
- Download environment here (environment mesh , environment.egg.pz)
- Download sound bg here (wave, ogg)
- Download textures (.jpg , .png)
Basic instructions :
Make a folder wherever you want
Make a folder “models” inside your root’s recently created directory
Uncompress actor and environment into “models”
Make a folder “textures” inside your root’s project
Uncompress textures inside your “textures”
Make a folder “sounds” inside your root’s project
Un compress sound(s) file(s) inside “sounds”
Action :
1 - Initialize Game Engine:
“place the code”
2 - Let’s add environment:
“place the code”
.
.
.
.
Z - Start the engine:
“place the code”
I’m sure this way is very funny and people will get easy to learn Panda and efficient.
to summarize your post in the 2 most basic rules of modelling:
- textures will make or break your model
- lighting is what makes it look realistic and gives the impression of depth.
about lights. lightmaps are totaly fine. even these days they are. they can outperform any dynamic lighting in both, quality and speed depending on the situation.
a quite good combination is pre-baked ambient occlusion + dynamic shadows. but that depends on the game itself.
yes, bake textures or lightmap are good, while in the scene not exist a movable object, this technique is the best…
even with moveable objects (such as characters and the likes its a good thing. you just have to combine baked and dynamic lighting/shadows in a smart way.
yes, of course, i was talking about all things except sprites.
Well the tree from Roaming Ralph looks like a collection of cones (i cant be sure, cant get an egg, dxf or x file to Blender).
EDIT: Also some stuff that I noticed which arent really important:
- The motion trails sample folder has an image of a dragon but the sample uses a monster (probably was added in recent versions.) This isnt really important but could be changed.
- The normal mapping sample has camera collisions. I dont remember any other samples like that having camra collisions (all with default camera controls). That is good but the code should stay small, also i dont see why it should be in the normalmapping sample but not the rest.
- Some samples should enable default camera (boxing, etc). Some samples like endless tunnel need to limit camera movement but this is different.
- The boxing robots sample needs a speed-up.
- The hello world terrain and roaming ralph terrain should really be remade, but i already said that…
i voted cant help but now im trying to apply some new textures from here since they are public domain now…
I think the Roaming-Ralph sample could also use a skydome:
sky=loader.loadModel("skydome")
sky.reparentTo(render)
sky.setScale(1)
sky.setBin('background', 1)
sky.setDepthWrite(0)
sky.setLightOff()
# move with camera
def skyTask(task):
camPos=camera.getPos(render)
sky.setPos(camPos)
#make sure the skydome doesn't move if we jump
camPos.setZ(0)
return Task.cont
taskMgr.add(skyTask,"whatever")