Journal SuiteSisterMary's Journal: My 3d games revalation 4
Maybe this has been discussed or implemented before; wouldn't surprise me, actually. But I've never, to my knowledge, heard it or seen it implemented.
I was thinking, yesterday, of Jedi Knight 2 and the new mission pack, I mean, game, Jedi Academy, and I got to thinking. A lightsabre, contrary to what the game tells you, tends to dismember people at the slightest touch.
That got me to thinking of how in JK2, you can only dismember at specific points; basically, joints. And that got me to thinking, why is that? Simple: those are places where it's easy to close off the 3d mesh, and they're obvious points to be dismembered at.
A little quick background: much as a cardboard box is a 3d object made by taking a flat sheet of cardboard and folding it in certain ways, but having a hollow interior, most objects in 3d games are flat meshes of triangles, folded in certain ways.
Why not build things out of pyramids, instead of triangles?
That way, if I wanted to, say, cleve my opponent in twain, from shoulder to opposite hip, rather than figuring out how to close the mesh, or even just applying a 'slash mark' decal to the model, you could simply separate the appropriate triangles. Then you'd have two fully 3d models, formerly bound, which are now separate. One would be affected by gravity, the other would be affected by the body kinesics code, in this case.
Then, as with 3d meshes, you improve the quality and fidelity of a model by shrinking down the size of the pyramids, and throwing more in.
Shouldn't tax video cards that much, as most of them don't bother rendering things that are obscured by things in front of them, anyway.
Make things more than one layer of pyramids thick, and suddenly you have 'deformable meshes' without needing to play tricks. A bomb lands on the ground, and blows away the top few layers of pyramids, as you'd expect. Shoot somebody with a railgun, and it just blows out the pyramids in the slug's line of fire, leaving a see-through hole without needing to screw around.
Kind of like extending a pixel into 3d gives you a voxel.
Voxels are not new (Score:1)
Re:Voxels are not new (Score:2)
I'm not sure that what I describe could be called 'voxels,' though.
And no, you wouldn't have to worry much about the other surfaces. Yes, you'd need to texture them and what not, but, just like the opposite side of whatever you're facing doesn't get rendered out, the 'insides' of a pyramid-built object wouldn't get rendered, either, unless they were exposed.
Just think of the interesting textures you could put on the 'internal facing' faces of the pyramids making up a character model....
Red Faction, a
Re:Voxels are not new (Score:1)
Seriously, though, the concept is interesting. Your pyramids (tetrahedrons) are to voxels as triangles are to pixels. It would be interesting to explore what could be done with tetrahedral meshes that had different degrees of rigidity (both the elasticity of the tetrahedrons
Re:Voxels are not new (Score:2)
EXACTLY!
I know a lot of effort went into, for example, Unreal Tournament 2003 to make bodies react appropriately to external force. This system would obviate quite a bit of that sort of extra work.
Define relationships and cohesions between the tets that make up an individual model; these two part easily, these two stretch, this rib spar, although surrounded by all this soft squishy flesh, is only actually connected to the rib cage;