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08-12-2013, 03:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-12-2013, 03:44 PM by RvBGames.)
Quote:Working with Unity for so many years now, nothing suprises me anymore 
The bad thing is that I don't have any statistics about my customers, not even an email address or any opportunity to make a survey. I would drop Unity 3 instantly, but I'm worrying about loosing customers. Supporting multiple versions is a pain...
Regarding the custom mesh errors: Extrusion is done in two steps: finding edge loop(s) and extruding them. Looks like the sorting inside the edge detection is causing the trouble.
I guess it would be taking a pretty chance to just drop 3.2 support and just see how people react.
But yeah I remember we once had a digital signature solution for our customers which naturally got updated to newer .NET versions. Until it turns out that one of our biggest customers was still using .NET 1.5 and was unable/unwilling to upgrade. It sure is a pain to build and test 2 separate versions.
I have one additional question regarding the mesh extrusion btw. Would it be possible to connect the last edge loop with the first (in splines that close and have a mesh going the whole way) in order to avoid shading artifacts due to the last segment being similar to a hard edge? Or would that not really fit elegantly in the current architecture/user workflow?
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I think that since in Unity 4.2 free includes all basic mobile licenses, realtime shadows and NavMesh baking plus other nice enanchements...there is no reason to stay with 3.5.
In my business machine I mantain both versions for the old completed projects but each developer can not do without try and use new features.
To make a survey you could use your thread in unity comunity to involve more people possible.
Max
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(08-12-2013, 03:43 PM)Kriechgebuesch Wrote: I have one additional question regarding the mesh extrusion btw. Would it be possible to connect the last edge loop with the first (in splines that close and have a mesh going the whole way) in order to avoid shading artifacts due to the last segment being similar to a hard edge?
That's on my roadmap allready. I've planned to support sharp edges in the meshbuilder in a way the that mesh renders without overlapping segments. Need to do some research on this topic, but I'm pretty sure some kind of postprocessing/welding is involved. As a side effect it should be fairly easy to weld the first/last segment's vertices.
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(08-12-2013, 03:54 PM)SJM Tech Wrote: I think that since in Unity 4.2 free includes all basic mobile licenses, realtime shadows and NavMesh baking plus other nice enanchements...there is no reason to stay with 3.5.
That's true. I consider dropping 3.X with the 1.51 release.
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Quote:That's on my roadmap allready. I've planned to support sharp edges in the meshbuilder in a way the that mesh renders without overlapping segments. Need to do some research on this topic, but I'm pretty sure some kind of postprocessing/welding is involved. As a side effect it should be fairly easy to weld the first/last segment's vertices.
I'm pretty sure that sharp edges are created by having 2 vertices occupy the same space. I think the sharpness effect comes from how the vertex normals affect the shading. When you import a model and calculate the normals with a smoothing angle of 0 (which gives it this old school sharp polygonal look) you'll notice that the vertex count of your model jumps um considerably. So I'm not sure how to express that in a mesh builder function but you basically don't wanna share a vertex with the next face when you want a hard edge without normal maps. Sorry if I just explained something you already understood well I'm not sure what part you're unsure about.
Or is your problem the way that you can't really easily mark a sharp edge in a flat mesh? There my only hacky unelegant idea would be marking sharp edges with vertex colors.
But glad to hear that you're considering it! Curvy seems to be really worth the money.
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As I see it, the problem is overlapping. The mesh builder advances the shape along the spline and connect the vertices to form triangles. If the spline is too curvy and distance between two shape segments is too short, segments will overlap and as a result the mesh looks ugly. So (at least in theory out of my head) handling this is a two step process: Detecting overlapping segments and resolving it.
Detecting isn't hard, basically Plane-Plane and Line-Line intersections. Solving that may be harder. Either welding vertices or repositioning them in a clever way might solve the problem.
I may be totally wrong and I didn't tried it yet. If you've got a great idea, let me know.
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(08-13-2013, 10:13 AM)Jake Wrote: As I see it, the problem is overlapping. The mesh builder advances the shape along the spline and connect the vertices to form triangles. If the spline is too curvy and distance between two shape segments is too short, segments will overlap and as a result the mesh looks ugly. So (at least in theory out of my head) handling this is a two step process: Detecting overlapping segments and resolving it.
Detecting isn't hard, basically Plane-Plane and Line-Line intersections. Solving that may be harder. Either welding vertices or repositioning them in a clever way might solve the problem.
I may be totally wrong and I didn't tried it yet. If you've got a great idea, let me know.
Aaah now I get what you mean by sharp edges. I was thinking of sharp edges in a sense of shading (you know smooth shading vs flat shading). But you're talking about sharp edges in curves! That sounds considerably less easy to solve indeed.
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The mesh extruder gives me hard times. I've decided to release 1.50fixed this evening, fixing small issues. Then 1.51 will be rolled out to beta testers to get the new features already implemented into testing. Then I will completely rewrite the SplinePathMeshbuilder to become more stable and more flexible for new features, targeting a release in 1.52.
While this take longer to get the custom mesh feature running for you customers, it hopefully will be rocksolid in the end.
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(08-14-2013, 03:56 PM)Jake Wrote: The mesh extruder gives me hard times. I've decided to release 1.50fixed this evening, fixing small issues. Then 1.51 will be rolled out to beta testers to get the new features already implemented into testing. Then I will completely rewrite the SplinePathMeshbuilder to become more stable and more flexible for new features, targeting a release in 1.52.
While this take longer to get the custom mesh feature running for you customers, it hopefully will be rocksolid in the end.
Hmm I guess I'd opt for a more solid release too. Is there any sort of rough time frame subject to change you're willing to give for 1.52 though?
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(08-14-2013, 07:25 PM)Kriechgebuesch Wrote: Hmm I guess I'd opt for a more solid release too. Is there any sort of rough time frame subject to change you're willing to give for 1.52 though?
Not really and it depends on the amount of work 1.51 needs to get shipped - hopefully not that much. For sure before the new Unity GUI is out
I'll do my best.
