beginner landscaping questions

[coder1024]

[coder1024]

What finally worked for me was to create the models in Anim8or and then export them as Wavefront (.obj) files. I wrote a little C++ command-line utility which reads the .obj file and creates a .scn file which contains the lines you can paste directly into FMSXYZ. You can then save/load and drag them around in FMSXYZ to place them.

The conversion was pretty straightforward. I only process faces with 4 vertices and I reverse the order of the vertices from what is in the Wavefront file. Also, the texture co-ords need to be scaled from 0-1 to 0-255 (although I'm not using textures).

The landscape so far looks like the below. Everything is to scale based on measurements taken on site. The soccer goals, fence, and baseball backstop were the 3D objects created in Anim8or and are just colored with no textures here.

I think I must be just about hitting the limit for the amount of stuff alllowable in the scene. If I add anything else, FMS just crashes when you start it, so I guess this is all the detail I can add.

[Perry]

You can sometimes get more objects in by making them with fewer faces.
If you want a tree with 3 faces instead of 4, grab a tree from my website.

http://www.polywop.com/fms/FMSIndex.html

There is also a Landscape on the Site called PPark that has an example of more than 200 tree objects.

Sometimes you can cram more in by removing the texture commands from all but the first object when you have like objects with the same textures. In other words group all like objects together, and remove the texture command from all but the first.

How are you making the backstop and goal posts? Are they extruded bars or are they texture maps?
Extruded bars can require a lot of faces in the object.

Perry

[coder1024]

I'll give those suggestions a try and look through some of the tree on your site. Hadn't thought of using a single texture command, but that sounds like a good approach.

For the goals, I just created a series of cube primitives and then sized them to the measurements. So each goal is 9 cubes with 6 faces each.

The fence and backstop were made using cylinders without end caps. For the cylinders, I set the # of divisions to be 5 so its slightly rounded looking as opposed to just going with 4 and making basically a cube without the ends. There are 19 cylinders with 5 faces each.

The above was after scaling things back somewhat. The default for cylinders was 12 divisions and I originally had the fence full of vertical pipes the whole way along it as with the real fence. When it started crashing, I reduced the complexity of the cylinders and took a bunch of them out.