Anim8or Community

You are welcome!  Looking forward to seeing what more you do with it!

Wow, Steve!
That is a great Christmas present! I have been asking for this for years!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

NickE

Yea!  You rock, Steve! This solves many of the problems with rendering script-driven physics simulations.  I used to have to start an object script, manually switch to scene mode and start rendering, then remove all the duplicate frames from the scene rendering as the object script ran in the background with strategic delays to give the renderer time to finish the frame before the object script incremented.

Ideally, the scene controller parameters "frame" or "time" would be available to object scripts from scene mode, but this is a huge step forward.

Thank you, Steve!

Depending on how your scene will interact with the added foliage, you could try billboarding.  This is a technique where you map a 2D image of the foliage as a texture, transparancy map, and bump map to a plane.  You can direct the plane to always be perpendicular to the camera so that the 2D nature of the plane is not noticable.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54871/what-is-billboarding-and-can-should-it-be-used-in-3d-games-to-create-special-ef

Have you ever had a collection of points and wanted a mesh that corresponded to the surface of those points?

In my never ending quest to bring physics (or to effects that look mostly like physics) to Anim8or through scripting, I was working with smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate fluids.  Using Anim8or points as particles, I was able to write scripts to simulate the fluid action, but had no real way of rendering just points.  The actual SPH script is still in development.

One popular way to extract a surface mesh from a point cloud is to use a technique called Marching Cubes.

Below is an implementation of the the Marching Cubes Algorithm in ASL.  The documentation for usage is within the script itself.

JSmith,

I personally do not use Kubajzz Boolean Scripts A-B or B-A.  I use the one attached below.

I looked at the an8 file you attached.  Your mesh "meshHH" had several problems including interior lines and duplicate points.  Your mesh "meshSS" had all its normals flipped inward, a couple of extra edges and several duplicate points.  These issues are probably what is causing the errors with the Kubajzz A-B Boolean script.

When I fixed these issues and ran the attached boolean operations script (selecting the "meshSS" so it would be subtracted from "meshHH"), the result was a good subtraction with the exception of a few faces with flipped normals.  I have attached the an8 file so you can compare the original vs repaired meshes and the results of the Boolean subtraction.

NickE

Raxx,

When I calculate the face normals from the average of the face vertex normals (calculated from the edge vectors from each point of the face), I do get different values than your script returns.  The edge vector calculated values return symmetrical normals for mirrored faces on your attached mesh.  I modified your script to add the manually calculated normals to the output.  You can see the variation in the individual vertex based face normals.  It seems the algorithm that Anim8or is using is significantly different or is suffering from a precision problem.

file $c;
shape $s, $childShapes[0];
int $i, $j, $k;
int $numSides;
point3 $faceNormal;

//added
int $l,$back,$fwd;
point3 $facePoint[0];
point3 $facePointNormal[0];
point3 $fPNavg;
 
$c.open("$console", "w");
 
project.curObject.GetShapes($childShapes);
 
for $i = 0 to $childShapes.size - 1 do
{
if($childShapes[$i].GetKind() == SHAPE_KIND_MESH)
{
$s = $childShapes[$i];
 
for $j = 0 to $s.GetNumFaces() - 1 do
{
if ($s.GetFaceSelected($j) == 1)
{
//$faceNormal = $s.GetNormal($s.GetFaceNormalIndex($j, 0));
$faceNormal=(0.0,0.0,0.0);
$fPNavg=(0.0,0.0,0.0);
$numSides = $s.GetNumSides($j);
        $facePoint.size = $numSides;
        $facePointNormal.size = $numSides;
for $k = 0 to $numSides - 1 do
{
$faceNormal = $faceNormal + $s.GetNormal($s.GetFaceNormalIndex($j, $k));
$facePoint[$k]=$s.GetPoint($s.GetFacePointIndex($j,$k));
$facePointNormal[$k]=(0.0,0.0,0.0);
}
 
$faceNormal = normalize(($faceNormal.x/(1.0 * $numSides), $faceNormal.y/(1.0 * $numSides), $faceNormal.z/(1.0 * $numSides)));

for $k = 0 to $numSides-1 do
{
          $back = $k - 1;
          if ($back < 0) $back = $numSides - 1;
          $fwd = $k + 1;
          if ($fwd > ($numSides - 1)) $fwd = 0;
          $facePointNormal[$k] = normalize(cross(($facePoint[$back]-$facePoint[$k]),($facePoint[$fwd]-$facePoint[$k])));
          $c.print("Calc FP %d Normal (%.3f,%.3f,%.3f)\n",$k,$facePointNormal[$k]);
          $fPNavg = $fPNavg + $facePointNormal[$k];
        }
        $fPNavg = normalize(($fPNavg.x / (1.0 * $numSides),$fPNavg.y / (1.0 * $numSides),$fPNavg.z / (1.0 * $numSides)));
$c.print("Face %d Anim8or normals (%.3f, %.3f, %.3f) Calc (%.3f, %.3f, %.3f)\n", $j, $faceNormal, $fPNavg);
}
}
}
}
 
$c.close();
 
NickE