Custom SURs

If Bj spots this, he is probably going to post here about them

Thwacks CoT

Hi MK, welcome to the Starport bud.

No I haven’t left FL, just that abortion that’s destroying the once proud name of TLR.

I’ve been meaning to send you a couple of my files for you to study, but my memory is crap atm (my medication plays havoc with the brain at times).

Basicly the CMP model can have as many groups as you need to make each component, the SUR on the other hand really only wants one group per component, it will work with more but the secret is really low poly SUR components, anything under 400 works well depending on how big the ship is.

This is the upper engine component from the ship I’m using to (try) write the SUR tutorial, it has 7 groups to make up that one component,

where as the same component in the SUR model has only one group.

Here’s the ship

it has 25 groups split into 7 components and 802 polygons.

While the SUR

has 7 groups & components and 182 polygons.

When I make a SUR I try and keep as many of the main vertex positions as possible, that way each component will retain the shape of the CMP’s component (that’s why I class my SURs as “skin tight”;)).

You’ve asked me about concave in the past, this

is the main hull from the above ship, concave is all about angles in FL, the angle between the faces of polygons, the angle in the pic is less than 180 degrees and will destroy the root if used.

To stop this you need to fill over the area for the SUR (red wireframe) so you end up with something that’s almost a primitive.

Biggest real problem I can see is that you’ve picked a stinker of a ship, shape wise, to learn with.

The yellow part (which I made by hand), the red part, the light blue part, and the purple part (the one close to us, not the one further behind) make up the Root SUR

This means they will be exported as one piece, leaving the root with a lot of concave angles, ideally you only want the yellow bit as the root.

Those 4 blue lines show a couple of the concave angles that will stop the root from working.

I started working on this ship recently myself, and I can tell you it’s giving me problems because of it’s shape. This is what will be exported as the Root in the CMP

Right away I know that this will be a b*tch to get the SURs root right with, that cockpit sticking above everything means this can’t be “skin tight” as it would have concave angles all over it, the underside doesn’t help any either as it’s almost corrigated in shape, but that doesn’t really matter as all of the vanilla SURs are the same as only the components are “skin tight”
I haven’t started the SUR yet as just regrouping this for the CMP gave me a headache, but as always the components will be a breeze it’s just the Root that will take some work.

if you made it so you have multiple parts of the SUR MESH, then cutting it up and exporting them as thier own sur and then splicing them together, they there would be no proplems with it… put thats my own opinions based from experience lol.

Bejaymac, does the concave problem apply outside of the ‘Root’ sur?

Amateur question:
Does the number of objects in the SUR have to match the number of objects in the CMP?
For example, if I am not going for destructible components, but simply a close-fitting SUR; I have the model exported as a single-object CMP, but if I design the SUR to be single-component, it either ends up concave, or, not quite close-fitting.

I mean, is it ok to have #ofCMPcomponents < #ofSURcomponents?

This might be of interest to you…
When DA/MS built FL they used Havok for the physics and collision. I posted about this on Lancers some years back after having a conversation with one of their programmers. Unfortunately nobody was able to do anything with it as they needed a commercial Havok licence to get at the source and Havok couldnt provide a plugin for us due to workloads.

Last week Havok finally released their physics and collision as “free” for download for non commercial use on PC’s only.

For those who have the time, there are two downloads, one to use with modelling (a plugin for max etc) and the source for programming physics.

People with a level of knowledge on surs already, might be able to use this and map the collision data to a point where its possible to be used. Or god forbid, the plugin actually might help solve the sur files issue.

Heres the links - you need to reg. to get the downloads, but its free. Either way I would have thought that this should be usefull.

http://tryhavok.intel.com/

im gunna have a butchers when i get back from work

MK after more than two years of working on SURs I’ve seen almost everything, including what you’ve posted about, the reality of the situation is that anything is possible.

(by “you” I mean everybody that reads this post) What you want to achieve depends entirely on you & your abilities, and the app you use (looks at CoT ). I don’t just mean your modeling ability, but your ability to understand what’s required, and to “see” what you need to do to get the CMP & SUR to work together, I only figured out this part after spending about a month studying the meshes I’d pulled out of DA’s CMPs & SURs. Even after two years I’m no expert as I still get caught out, take the hellhound (the model mknote is working on), it’s an awkward shape and at first I thought it only needed to be done as 9 components, so that’s what I made the CMP, last night I was half way through the SUR when I realised that the bloody cockpit would knacker the “Root”, so the cockpit became the tenth component, which meant I had to alter the model for the CMP and export a new CMP.

@ Lancer Solurus, yes, it’s only the “Root” you need to worry about, components can be concave without problems.

@ BBalazs, you might find this link useful, if you don’t want to go through the “hassle” of multi-component CMP & SURs, iirc it’s what OPR8R uses for his CF ships, it still takes a bit of work & modelling knowledge, but is (just) better than a resized vanilla SUR.

not 100% what i use but the basics are the same
ive tried several methods creating surs but this one has turned out to be the best considering that the others cause lag on the servers

**Thanks Bejaymac, thats what I needed to know.

If anyone is interested, there is a site with some info about the Havok engine. Go to google and do a search on

IVP_Controller_Phantom

that is found in Common.dll. You will see what I mean
There should only be 3 items found, look at the first or second one. Many of the nicknames dealing with sur collisions found in the Common.dll can be found on this site….

If you find out this is pirated info, let me know and I will remove this part of my post.**

Hey, first post.

I’m Sov, hitbox dude over from Freeworlds.

I’ve got the same problems everyone has, exact same as you mknote. I’ve got the chance to extensively test all the ships I’m working on as static objects, some are headaches to say the least. I’ve gotten several ships with completely custom boxes done and 100% functional, where others give me all sorts of bizarre problems no matter how much redesign work I do.

I think this is a nearly hopeless art, but perhaps someday someone will come through with an answer. In the meantime if you have a troublesome ship, the simpler the box, the better chance it will work it seems. Often enough no matter what shape the box, simply the location on the ship effects it. I have an area on one of our capital ships I’m working on right now that consistently fails to function, I can fly and shoot right through it no matter what shape I cover it with in MS3D.

Im getting the same issue, problem is, no matter how many times i export from milkshape, the sur NEVER gets past the ROOT sur. ever. it worked ONCE, then it just decided to give me the finger and run off

TBH if it doesn’t fit inside a dreadnoughts docking bay then don’t waste your time with the shield bubble setting, stick to shrinkwrap and the splicer for larger objects. FL only uses the bubble format with the [Ship] FIGHTER & FREIGHTER types, used with any other type and only the Root will register.

Ditto that, I splice every single ship & object I do, and we’ve ditched shield bubbles all together shrinkwrapping everything. I never had much luck exporting the entire box at once, HardCMP would often see the box correctly but it would remain completely non-functional.

Check this out guys…

I’m Very Sad it did not emerge until now that this is possible, it saves HOURS of work making sur parts convex.

http://forums.seriouszone.com/showthread.php?t=56348

ROFLMFAO ;D ;D ;D That’s how I used to make my Root’s, I stopped using it so I could do really skin tight SURs.

EDIT
There are a couple of things you need to watch out for with this, high poly models can give you overlapping polygons in the shrinkwrap (very bad news), there are also instances when the shrinkwrap isn’t properly formed around your mesh.

PS. I still use this for my damage cap SURs, export the damage mesh to get it “wrapped”, import the SUR & delete the Root group, weld it and then export the SUR again, strip the new “wrap” with the splicer, change the SUR type with FlModelTool, and because proper 3DB’s don’t have “Roots” I then hex edit it to change the Root ID tag.