CMP to SUR Conversion Tests

StarTrader wrote:
please make [HpMount] an option button or check-box

Added to my list.

I have had no troubled with this cmp to sur program that I can reamber. Just some pc troubles the I caused by running it with milkshape open at the same time .

lonestar wrote:
I have had no troubled with this cmp to sur program that I can reamber. Just some pc troubles the I caused by running it with milkshape open at the same time .

Good, thank you for the report, lonestar.

The SUR Builder is big. It reserves 1.7GB of RAM. Depending on how much memory you have, it may not take much to make the PC do a lot of paging.

could you probably reduce this RAM requirement?

I only have 2 gig DDR3 memory, and a AMD phenom II X4 940 Processor running at 3 gig.

Yes its a quad core 3 gig cpu, I have room for more memory but I don’t have it in yet.

But the machine I use this on is an AMD Athlon Processor 3200+ 1.88gig cpu with 1.25 ram, maybe DDR2 memory.

That is the machine I use with this program and It DOES lag on load and model loading.

As you probably know, 2GB is light in a quad-core system. Memory is roughly divided among the processors.

I will try to reduce the memory requirement, but I cannot guarantee it.

Bullwinkle wrote:
As you probably know, 2GB is light in a quad-core system. Memory is roughly divided among the processors.

I will try to reduce the memory requirement, but I cannot guarantee it.

Yes I know that, but the thing is I can not aford more ram at this point in time, and I plan to get more soon.

Fact is that a) 4GB is mostly standard nowadays and b) you need a certain amount of pc power to calculate complex things.

Just for the record, I run it in 750MB on my 1.4MHz Centrino laptop.

I had to resize my pagefile to get it to run, and every 3-4 starts I haveto zero the pagefile again. But I can live with it as long as it starts, I have maybe 30 surs to produce then it will not be required regularly.

But reducing the requirement will help many.

Another quibble: 4GB standard? For a PC? You are loonies! Off your rockers! rofl

IBM Mainframes still run banks and airlines gaily on 64GB and less!

However as new PCs contain that amount, why not! Soon it will be 8GB anyway, then eventually 1TB. The factories cannot stop producing memory and Intel will not stop making faster cpus.

While you can afford it, fill your boots!

Dualcore 2.6g with 2g ram… shame about the vista though… lol

Now… not so much a request, but this is the type of thing i’d be looking at a formfitting sur for…

Eagle/Dagger .sur just aint gonna cut this one…

Xarian_Prime wrote:
this is the type of thing i’d be looking at a formfitting sur for…

Good example, Xarian. Thank you.

If you build your cmp in parts then the SUR Builder should follow the outline of the parts.

Philosophically, a simple shape around the spines seems more “correct”, to me, than a form-fitting SUR. The purpose of a SUR is to approximate the shape of the ship with a minimal number of polygons, in order to reduce the calculation burden on the engine.

A SUR that requires a lot of polys to enclose a complex shape defeats the purpose of the SUR.

For a station, or an enormous cap ship, a SUR that approximately follows some of the spines might make sense, so that a fighter could fly between the spines. But, for a fighter, a simple shape is more “correct”.

Also, if the ship has a shield, then the hit area should be more like a bubble than like a spiny shape. So making a form-fitting SUR is actually less realistic, in that case.

Have you tried the SUR Builder on that ship? I have a similar test model, but the cmp is made in a single part, so the SUR Builder makes a simple envelope around the tips of the spines (which is, from my POV, “correct” ).

She’s all one piece atm… so yeah i got a pretty big block basically… works ingame well enough for collision proposes (you’d hit a spike anyway at that part of ship) but i do have its big sister as well… and that’s the one i’ll most probably need to worry about… All good, just thought i’d give you something a tad out of the ordinary to think about 8-)

Xarian_Prime wrote:
just thought i’d give you something a tad out of the ordinary to think about

Yes, thanks. Your Shadow fighter is a perfect example of a point that I tried (unsuccessfully) to make earlier: A simple outline SUR is more “correct” for a fighter-size model than a form-fitting SUR.

When you do the “big sister” ship, can you group the CMP into parts? Then the SUR Builder should be able to follow the outlines of the groups.

Remember, the SUR is intentionally approximate. You would not want a SUR to look exactly like the CMP… the SUR should have the absolute minimum number of polygons that can roughly approximate the shape of the model.

More Polys = More Lag

Nah, that’s a Crab Cruiser - in my mod it’s around 300metres across! So it can’t have a big envelope!

StarTrader wrote:
in my mod it’s around 300metres across! So it can’t have a big envelope!

Right, so, as I said, just break the model into parts.

Is there any problem with that approach?

But, for a fighter, a simple shape is more “correct”.

it depends on the univers …
for SW, the shield is a projection between the atoms of the hull
so it needs to be the more accurate possible
the less polygons with the more accuracy …

a question :

when we choose multi part for the sur types we have a pop up who said :

“Multi-Part Sur creation requires model with one mesh per cmp part.”

if we want a more accurate hitbox we need a multi group cmp allright ?
yet i can build a cmp with x groups but still one VMeshLibrary

Is there a link or maybe i don’t understand what “Multi-Part Sur creation requires model with one mesh per cmp part.” means ?

Bullwinkle wrote:

StarTrader wrote:
in my mod it’s around 300metres across! So it can’t have a big envelope!

Right, so, as I said, just break the model into parts.

Is there any problem with that approach?

No problem, that is exactly what should be done. Each of the arms can be broken into smaller pieces so the sur can follow the approximate shape without bridging curves too much. However remember that the sur will only work with the new cmp. And it may take several attempts to get a good-looking one.

Now - it is possible to use a simplified sur with fewer groups with an old cmp as long as the names of the groups in the sur and cmp still match. This will take care to do though, but could help in larger ship surs.

But my point on the Crab Cruiser was that because it is so large it must not have an HpMount sur - the “shield bubble” of the old exporter.

BW - on low-poly surs, you are quite right, people think too much on contour-following and it is not often necessary until ships are very large. It is lost on fighters of less than 10-12 metres in my opinion unless they have booms or fins or large wings or spikes like this one, with big empty space between. Small detail will not be seen in combat.

I know modders like to go to infinite detail on maybe break-offable bits, just as they do with texturing, but who will see that on a ship less than 8 metres flying past at 500km/second?!

But on large ships (and of course stations) where other ships can fly between the booms then it would not be good to have a sur covering those gaps.

I have not made surs for scenery or stations so I can’t comment on the sur builder’s ability there - can anyone else?

Right, I agree with most of that.

One detail, for the sake of clarity for all readers:

StarTrader wrote:
And it may take several attempts to get a good-looking one.

Just to be sure that we are all on the same page here, “good-looking” is irrelevant for a SUR.

The SUR is the computer’s Point of View (POV) of an object. For most things, a blob is all that is required to track movements and hits.

Even with form-fitting SURs, the goal is extremely low poly count. Close-fitting is irrelevant. Looks are irrelevant. We just want an approximate fit that uses minimal polygons.

The rest of your note sounds right to me.

To be honest, I don’t understand the approach of the Sur Builder anyway. To my understanding the problem was a wrong implementation of the sur format which the exporters and the other tools messing with surs use. So why not just fix the tools and let people decide how much polygons they use. There are pretty sophisticated algorithms for polygon reduction already available in many modeling programs. Alternatively you just build your own simple mesh out of some boxes etc.

I would even try to build a .obj->.sur converter, if there was a an easy to understand documentation of the sur format.

Concerning the memory use of the Sur Builder: From my viewpoint, there is absolutely no excuse for using 1,7GB of memory other than broken by design. There are so many ways of allocating memory so that you don’t need to allocate it all on startup. Even then just building a simplified mesh out of some vectors would never need so much memory.

I do not disagree, Schmackbolzen.

However, I will say that the SUR Builder is a convenient tool for making a SUR in a few minutes.

Lack of documentation on the SUR format seems to be the weakest link. Everybody appears to be guessing about it.

The memory thing appears to be due to some library code, but it is not mine, and some of it appears to have been originally written in straight C. I am not allowed to publish the code, so it is not worth a lot of time for me to figure it out, or to update it. The original author has said that he is willing to help, but he has been busy with professional work. Remember that nobody is getting paid for this work, so when the design decision is a choice between “quick” and “good”, then “quick” usually wins!

So it is a cool tool as it stands, but I agree that a reliable exporter would be valuable, as well.