the skin for organisms

How will skin be applied to creatures in the editor? I know meta-balls was discussed, but I think something else should be used.

jaws2blood wrote:

How will skin be applied to creatures in the editor? I know meta-balls was discussed, but I think something else should be used.

The OE?
I've given this some thought, and still don't know if there is a really good way to do it. The muscle and bone structure is all made out of metaballs and basic primitives, so the shapes are fairly predictable. The problem is that those structures are pretty complex, so putting the skin over them has to either reduce or keep the same complexity.

My only idea right now is to use voxels. Wherever a voxel intersects with the outer surface of a creature, the central point of that voxel becomes a vertex on the skin. Vertexes are connected by lines closest first, provided these lines don't pass through the creature.

For an early release, however, we might as well just make all of the organisms out of basic primitives, primarily prisms, and not worry about the skin.

So for brushing on fur or hair or feathers would these vertices form polygons on which the fur/hair/feathers would attach?

Also, this would make scales very easy to do because it could be just skin with a different texture.

NickTheNick wrote:

So for brushing on fur or hair or feathers would these vertices form polygons on which the fur/hair/feathers would attach?

Also, this would make scales very easy to do because it could be just skin with a different texture.

That's the idea. Btw, hair and feathers will be handled by a mix of texture/2D "billboards" instanced onto the mesh of the creature created by said vertexes.

And the player designates the instances where these "billboards" would be placed on the organism with the hair/feathers brush in the OE?

NickTheNick wrote:

And the player designates the instances where these "billboards" would be placed on the organism with the hair/feathers brush in the OE?

Precisely. There are a few different procedures we can use for generating them using auto-evo as well, such as giving hair to all polygons whose real faces intersect with rays pointing down along the creature's y axis, covering all polygons with hair, and covering all polygons with a certain range of slopes. Covering all polygons within x radius of the spinal cord, etc.

Ahh I see. Clever guy Scio.

NickTheNick wrote:

Ahh I see. Clever guy Scio.

I endeavor to be. Other than those, we could (we will probably have to) do some sort of procedural texture unwrapping, and from the unwrapped texture, it's possible to tag a certain procedurally created skin section to have hair. However, let's not worry about unwrapping right now, because it's quite messy. Also see Ocean Quigley's Blog.

In this image, you can see that at one point they include procedurally generated hair clumps.


Reading some of his posts, it's interesting to see that we're taking a lot of the same paths and having the same sort of ideas they had in early development.