Twisted DIRT Forums

I want a plain haybale (just regular hay texture) that will be invisible for about 30 seconds at the start of a race then be visible for the rest of the race. I have a section in my contest track that comes across the start so I don't want the bale there while everyone takes off, but I want it to be there the next lap. If anyone can do this by the 31st I would really appreciate it.

It cant be done the way your asking u can have it invisible and the visible when u get close to it or the other way around


Extreme

U can make it move up from underneeth the ground real quickly?

In a blink of an eye lol 


Extreme

Quote from: Extreme on August 27, 2004, 07:26:48 PM
It cant be done the way your asking u can have it invisible and the visible when u get close to it or the other way around


Extreme

just curious....how?

Lets say u make a haybale and put the pivot point at the top of that haybale so it will be underground in the game u export that as something like LOD0 then back to max move the pivot point to the bottom of the haybale and export it as LOD1 then u need a great little tool that jeff made SLT_Assistant http://www.jeffhamblin.com/mcm2files/utils/slt/SLT_Assistant_Help.html
and u can read what to do the the 2 slt's on that page
what it does is swop the slt's around LOD0 (the one underground in this case) and when u get close to it LOD1 looks like it just pops up thats it

Extreme

wow, thats cool. But I would think it would make you lag more. Atleast for me. When I come close to trees, and the detail increases, there is a spike in the drop on FPS.   Then again, I guess if the trees were always in high detail, the fps would be consistanly lower.

If you can only do it with LOD then I'll just no have a haybale there. I was just thinking that ther might be a way to make a non-looping animation that had the haybale under the ground at first then pop up later. But if that's not possible then that's ok. Thanks.

Hey davie, glad to see you back.  Do you have an entry in the contest? 

You can make a haybail rise outta the ground and stay. In Dillo2 you could just un-check loop animation. I'm sure somebody could make a simple rising animation.

There is a problem with non looping animation, either Rainbow didn't code it properly (since all animations except the start-up ones which are special cases aren't looping that's not impossible), or we don't understand how the non looping animations are supposed to work. Either way look at Diablo's startgate - that is set up to be non-looping but it isn't. Me and Extreme managed to get a stargate that didn't loop but the number of frames had to be less than the FPS for it to work, so you always have an animation time less than 1 sec which wouldn't work in this case.

Another way to do it would be to have a long animation time in 2 sections, with a short first section (bales down) - enough time to clear the funnel, and then a long time with bales in place. That way if it loops they might disappear but not for long, if you sync the animation time with the lap time you could make sure that when the bales disappear it is mostly when the riders are on the other side of the track.

Laurie

Thanks guys. Yes, I did finish a track for the contest. I have already uploaded it so I guess there's now more need for the bale (at least for now). I'll try and post a couple pics of the track in the teaser thread.

Thanks,

Wow Davie...sorry I didn't see this before the deadline. You wouldn't have needed to animate this at all to get it done. You could just do an LOD bale AND make it so that at close proximity you couldn't see the backside of the bales (alpha transparency) or the tops...but at far distances you COULD see both and the front and ends could probably have been normal. I'm assuming that you didn't get that close to the bales again of course. But I've seen bales skinned wrong before were one (or more) sides were completely invisible (just for lack of skinning them at all in MAX). So I'm sure that with the proper setup...it could have been done.