Explain the difference...

[Chrysaor]

Can someone explain to me the difference, or just point me in the right direction of what and how many types of brushes there are...

Lemme elaborate. What's the difference between a hardware brush and a BSP brush? What in general is a mesh? and then how does that transfer to UED? Anything I make in Max would be a mesh right? But then from that point I can transfer it to UEd as a mesh or brush? Yes? NO? I'm just confused I need some info, thx.

 

[Hourences]

you can make meshes and briushes in max, many of the rocks and stuff in epic maps are made with max, and they are obisvioully not meshes
a bsp brush is erm , the normal thing a brushs that works with the bsp and stuff

a mesh doesnt interact with the bsp, doesnt make or doesn get bsp cuts from other brushes, and has at this point no collision, you can step trough it, and ued trys to fix it with this ghey collision radius thing, wich is a cylinder shape and highly ghey
so meshes suck too use in maps they got a **** lightmap too, very undetailed

a hardware brush is then the advanced form of a mesh combined with a bsp brush more or less, it doesnt interact with the surounindg bsp, so it doesnt makes cut or gets cut, but it does have per pixel collison, like a real brush, so no more ghey cylinder collision things
and cause it doesnt makes bsp cuts, and there trough cant create bsp erros like homs, you can use a lot more detail, and its lightmapping is more detailed too, and it supports stuff like erm, whats it called, this auto rounding (i thought it supported it not sure , so it can make a cubbical shap look more rounder, like you got in max too, you can smooth something
and the engine sees only 1 hardware brush, so if you make a whole forrest out of 1 tree, the engine will think its only 1 tree, so thats cool too

akuma can correct whats wrong

 

[Chrysaor]

So does the engine draw the entire hardware brush like it does a mesh?

"the engine sees only 1 hardware brush, so if you make a whole forrest out of 1 tree, the engine will think its only 1 tree, so thats cool too "
I don't quite understand how this would work, but it sounds really cool.

Can I skin Hardware brushes like meshes? (and still have them transfer to UEd 2 or 2.6 with texture coordinates?)

As far as Akuma stopping by...I think he's insanely busy right now...

 

[Hourences]

erm dunno about the fact if he draws it totaly at once or not, i think it does, but acutally dunno

the pc only loads 1 of your 500 trees in his memory, so it doesnt has to remeber all those 500 trees, it thinks its only 1 tree, so the avaible space thats comes free for that can be used for more other stuff, but its still rendered in game offcourse, but i dunno how big it affects the fps, how the polycount work with hardware brushes

lol dunno for the texturing, i asume you can change it like a normal brush but dunno

 

[Bot_40]

I remember someone saying somewhere that hardware brushes will make up most of your level. To me that implies that in UED you would add them and texture them in much the same way as you do with normal brushes in UT.

 

[bobtheking]

A brush modifies the BSP, not sure about hardware ones, but i know that the definition of a mesh is something that is made of triangles, not polygons, there isn't a lightmap either, it is vertex lighting. as said above, there isn't per triangle collision, it is this dumb collision cylinder.

on about hardware brushes, i thought they are ones that are transformed by hardware transformation on Geforce/maybe radeon cards. on geforce cards they have this awsome thing called a vertex shader. it sounds dumb, but it actually does everything about that vertex for the processor, so we get WAY more nodes which translates to polys it also frees up the processor for other stuff. thats how those unreal 2 screenies had what looks like thousands of polys. i'm not sure if thats what hardware brushes are.

 

[StoneViper]

Originally posted by Hourences
erm dunno about the fact if he draws it totaly at once or not, i think it does, but acutally dunno

the pc only loads 1 of your 500 trees in his memory, so it doesnt has to remeber all those 500 trees, it thinks its only 1 tree, so the avaible space thats comes free for that can be used for more other stuff, but its still rendered in game offcourse, but i dunno how big it affects the fps, how the polycount work with hardware brushes

lol dunno for the texturing, i asume you can change it like a normal brush but dunno

i read somewhere, it will dramatically increase fps. due to the fact that the slowdown occurs during the loading of the trees into memory, not the displaying (as in on your screen) stage of rendering them. i could be wrong, because i can't remember where i read that.

also last i read, the UW engine (and after) will make use of this, not quite sure the UT engine does.

 

[Chrysaor]

I talked to an old friend (he's 17 :/) about this and he said that the radeon's and geF's took care of all those poly's so that the CPU didn't have to. Esentially what I've got here. Whenever I've got a engine question I should just ask him, i forgot he's writing one He's aiming at 1,000,000 per framepolys btw

 

[Hourences]

the engine sees only 1 tree, so it will only load 1 tree, cause all others are identicall to that 1 tree, so it shiuldnt slow down during loading then

ut doesnt, it sux to hard to do it

 

[Chrysaor]

Originally posted by Hourences

ut doesnt, it sux to hard to do it

It's SO TRUE!
I've moved on and you all should too

 

[Akuma]

The hardware brush (prefab) is instanced so it's only 'loaded into memory' once (how simple is that ) but the polycount isnt affected by instancing

yes you can, and need to skinmap/skin hardware brushes in max

think of them as meshes with slightly better lighting and better visibility code.

and yes /me is busy

 

[Chrysaor]

Great, then I can go crazy with prefabs before U2 comes out

 

[StoneViper]

Originally posted by Hourences
the engine sees only 1 tree, so it will only load 1 tree, cause all others are identicall to that 1 tree, so it shiuldnt slow down during loading then

ah thanx for correcting me, now i know

 

[Chrysaor]

One last question.

If a hardware brush has a different skin does it also have to be drawn? Like two trees, one a sycamore, the other an oak, would they need to be drawn separately because of different skinnings?

 

[Dai]

Originally posted by Hourences
you can make meshes and briushes in max, many of the rocks and stuff in epic maps are made with max, and they are obisvioully not meshes

eerr... anything made in max or any other modeling package is a mesh. It's not an Ued specific term.

 

[Akuma]

a little knowledge goes a long way

 

[Dai]

"per pixel collision"

funny

 

[Chrysaor]

Originally posted by Dai
"per pixel collision"

funny

hehe

 

[TheRealFluffy]

euh, this topic is about Unreal 2 isn't it? I thought... hardware brush... hm... wtf is that, never heard of it

 

[Chrysaor]

WEll yes it is for teh most part of my purposes.