Feature showcase: Topology Analysis & Increase Resolution.

Banshee

I've been adding some features for beta versions of VXLSE III that may aid some of you to obtain excellent normals for your voxel model. Here's a quick demonstration of some of the features. First of all, make sure you have VXLSE III 1.39.140 or a newer version of the program.

Once your voxel is opened and almost finished, go to Tool -> Quality Analysis -> Topology Analysis.

It analyses the face neighbourhood of each voxel to predict which ones will get good normals and which ones will not reflect light to the correct direction.

If your score is low (anything below 75%), leave the topology analysis and go to Section -> Increase Resolution. Then, check the quality of the topology again to check the difference.

The Increase Resolution feature doubles the size of your voxel, but ensures that every voxel will get at least one neighbour face. And it does that keeping the object looking as close as its original shape. That improves the 'behaviour' of the voxels, but it makes the game run a bit slower (the model will be heavier).

Tip of the day: Perfect Normals

Now, test the auto normals after increasing the resolution. Use Cubed Auto-Normals instead of Tangent Plane and keep all other settings untouched. And praise the results. Even your craziest models will look good.

Banshee · Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 7:58 pm Post subject:

Did anyone tried it or nobody bothered?

Starkku · Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 8:18 pm Post subject:

I tried it with voxels from my mod and those just lying around on my HD. Considering it seems to mainly check if voxels have neighbouring voxels (if I am right), filled out (partially or just from the 'edges', so to say) voxel graphics seem to score fairly high, I had hard time finding anything that would score below 90%, and for those which did I was able to guess that it would hand out a lower score before I ran the tool. Oh and I did find atleast one unit voxel in my mod that had perfect 100% (this one) #Tongue

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I think 'Increase resolution' might be useful in certain cases, definitely better than the 'Full resize', which was your only option in the past if you wanted to up-scale your voxel graphics.

I'd say pretty useful tool for identifying certain types of problems with voxel graphics. Altough even with perfect or near-perfect voxel topology & normals you can ruin the whole damn thing with piss poor coloring job.

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Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

I'll run a few .vxl's tonight and post my results.

I have to say, this is looking very impressive so far. Very Happy

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom

Mig Eater · Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 8:40 pm Post subject:

Got a rating of 0% on this one o.0

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Banshee · Posted: Fri May 18, 2012 8:42 pm Post subject:

If your model has a lone voxel (a pixel alone, lost, flying in the middle of nowhere), your score is 0, independently of the rest of the model.

Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

Not bad for something I made 4 yrs ago Razz

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom

Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

O.K. how do I go about fixing these?. I tried like hell for the past 4 hrs trying to get a 100% score and failed. Can you explain a little bit more on how to achieve a 100% score. Attached pic to show what I'm talking about.

and why does the topology tool say there is 29928 vxls and the 3d preview says there is 46410 vxls?

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Banshee · Posted: Mon May 21, 2012 8:17 pm Post subject:

This score was just a first and quick attempt to rate the quality of the volume shape. Don't take it strictly to heart, because there are some serious mistakes which I'll fix once I manage to tone down my stress.

Anyway, if you use Increase Resolution once, you'll be able to obtain perfect results with Cubed Auto Normals, regardless of not reaching 100% score.

But, if you are curious about the things you've spotlighted in your picture, here we go:

1) Manifold Voxels, 2 Possible Normals: These are voxels that have at least one face neighbour in two axis and no face neighbours in the third axis.

2) Manifold Voxels, Ambiguous Normals: These are voxels that have at least one face neighbour in one axis and no face neighbours in the second and third axis.

Cranium · Defense Minister **Joined**: 05 Dec 2009 **Location**: USA

So where is the increase resolution thingy? Nevermind I got it. And thanks for clarifying the other things.

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The enemy shall be injected with toxic poison - Venom

Graion Dilach · Posted: Sun May 27, 2012 11:15 am Post subject:

Sorry for joining relatively late to the party, but I only had opportunity to try out this thing today.

First, Increase Resolution is awesome. It has a tiny issue with aliasing remap red with using brick, I noticed, but it still beats Full Resize hands down.

And yeah, Cubed also works nicely there... all in all, you did an amazing job there.

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"If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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EVA-251 · Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 3:45 pm Post subject:

Could Increase Resolution be extended? I think this feature could be golden if it allowed a range of resize options: 25%, 33%, 50%, 100%, 200% and also had a few options regarding the voxel's colors: no blur, blur.

I have a number of small voxels that could use this feature but at 2x become far too big, and I'm not too sold on voxel-bounds resizing.

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YR modder/artist, DOOM mapper, aka evanb90
Project Lead Developer, New-Star Strike (2014-)
Former Project Lead Developer Star Strike (2005-2012), Z-Mod (2006-2007), RA1.5 (2008-2013), The Cold War (2006-2007)

Banshee · Posted: Thu May 31, 2012 8:09 pm Post subject:

It's complicated to extend it to other sizes, because it is the nature of the algoritm that it uses is to double the size of the model. Maybe, I could let it resize down the voxel after it doubles it, but all its abilities to fix the topology of the model would be gone. And, changing the bounds would provide a much better result than resizing it down, even if it would be a bit heavier in game.

EVA-251 · Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2012 6:24 am Post subject:

I don't want resizing downwards, I just want other upsizing options. 25% bigger, 33% bigger, 50% bigger. Double is nice but leaves way too much to work with.

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YR modder/artist, DOOM mapper, aka evanb90
Project Lead Developer, New-Star Strike (2014-)
Former Project Lead Developer Star Strike (2005-2012), Z-Mod (2006-2007), RA1.5 (2008-2013), The Cold War (2006-2007)

Banshee · Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2012 9:06 am Post subject:

So, if you double it and then resize down, you'd get the effects of increasing resolution in 25%, 33%, etc bigger than the current size (before doubling it).