Rolken, on 11 April 2012 - 11:53 AM, said:
Candescence, on 11 April 2012 - 08:33 AM, said:
Of course, we will have to test these in various model formats to make sure they work correctly, but baby steps.
Is there context on what the engine is expecting for assets? The first character model might as well be a sphere or a cube, but if the engine can't work with it it's useless.
Well, may as well put some things out there for people to think about.
First off, assuming we'll have a per-pixel lighting pipeline, generally speaking normal maps will be useful to test those, and different meshes that have proper UV maps applied.
Assume OpenGL-style normal maps.
Bonus points: bent normals tend to be good for testing different diffuse lighting techniques.
Character-wise, it really isn't going to matter. Internally the engine will have its own collider specified for character collisions in the world. This will probably be a capsule initially.
However, for the sake of testing animated models, if anyone has a sonic model with animations handy (that *they* created or otherwise have the rights to redistribute), I doubt anyone would complain. It doesn't have to be perfect, or otherwise follow any specific style, so long as it's rigged with a skeleton and is suitable for animating, we'll eventually use it once things have progressed to that point.
Eventually, it'll be necessary to test different collision hulls on static meshes, however this may not be an issue if Bullet has a means to create convex decompositions of meshes built-in.
Anything else anyone would like to add?