SlipperyBrick

@tjheldna this might be of interested to you. Since MODO 10 they added extra tools (vertex normal toolkit) that allows you to do exactly what I mentioned above. Might be worth a shot baking the results of the weighted normals into a normal map and using that inside Leadwerks so you get those nice edges you can see in Unity into Leadwerks.

I would recommend looking at what weighted vertex normals are. You can achieve weighted vertex normals in pretty much any modelling package. As a quick explanation each vertex has a normal (some modelling programs give each face it's own smoothing group which ends up giving you triple the vertices you actually have (triple the normals too, remember every vertex has a normal), to stop this you can put every face of your model in one smoothing group). Weighted vertex normals basically uses the area (the area being referred to as the "weight") of a face to shift the normal of the vertex. This provides a more pleasing look for shading on your models faces. You can use weighted vertex normals to fake rounded edges without adding extra geometry to your model by optionally baking the results to a normal map. There is slightly more to it than I explained above but to get the general gist of how it works the above explanation should give you a quick idea Here is some images: Blender: Leadwerks:

I cannot wait for LE5, very excited for it

Edge Split modifier and Auto Smooth are pretty much the same thing which makes this really confusing haha. There is two differences though between Auto Smooth and Edge Split and that is that the data from the Edge Split modifier is available for you which can help when you want to write things like custom export scripts to use for game engines (just like the Blender Exporter for Leadwerks). Auto Smooth is just a preview option within the viewport in Blender it doesn't actually split the vertex normals like the Edge Split modifier, Auto Smooth is useful when you want to use it for a quick render or preview in the viewport without actually committing the changes it makes to your mesh.

@Core in Leadwerks when you calculate your normals you will want to specify an angle rather than calculating the normal angle by an average. I would recommend to try and put a high angle like 70 or 90 and see if that works for you. @mdgunn when you mark edges as sharp in Blender that adds a tag to that edge, its mainly for the edge split modifier. Marking edges as sharp lets the edge split modifier know which edges the modifier is applied to.

Nice work @Core really liking those beveled edges @mdgunn yeah the shared textures works really well and helps lower your draw calls to the GPU. It also has the benefit of keeping your scene consistent too in terms of color palette. I'll see if I have time to put together a real example, I got some assignments to do over the Christmas holiday but it wouldn't hurt to screw around in Leadwerks for a break

Awwwww shiiiteee I'm so excited for Leadwerks 5

Medium polygon modelling gives you the best of both worlds. You can usually create very good quality models which are reasonable in poly count and fake rounded/bevelled edges in the normal map. This is the workflow they used when modelling for the game Alien: Isolation. Also Simplygon is a great way to decimate high poly meshes. It's used to create LOD's but doesn't hurt to decimate your mesh to get it even lower poly, it's also free and used in a ton of games like Resident Evil 7, Playerunknown Battlegrounds, etc. https://simplygon.com/#get Also look into other area's as well to get great performance like packing your textures, if you pack your textures together you can then make one material for them, that one material can texture multiple objects that's less draw calls to the GPU giving you a little better performance. Although this may take some planning the pay off is good. You can put some focus on other area's of your game with the performance boost you've made

Thanks for the link, this is something very interesting and also overlooked when programming. I've just enrolled at University (BSc Computer Games Development) we had a week long module of CT which was very insightful.

Leadwerks 5 sounds great, really pleased to hear that you will still be able to buy Leadwerks on a non subscription basis. Looking forwards to the new lighting equation and rendering!

I have recently come back to this blog to go through the code again to make a character controller and I seem to be getting an issue with the player camera. I have attached my script to a CSG box and when I move the camera rotates but doesn't follow the box, it's as if the camera's position is fixed but I can still rotate it. Not to sure where I have gone wrong as all I have done is copy and paste the code.

The ability to scale/tile your materials on static geometry rather than extending your UV map's outside the 0 - 1 space.

That's cool. I'll put this in as a suggestion instead then

Ah right, thanks for the info macklebee! I thought there was a way to scale any material for any kind of surface, be it CSG or a static mesh, looks like you can't do this in Leadwerks. I'm sure I've managed to do it before lol, ah well back to the drawing board. For now I'll just have to extend my UV's outside the 0 - 1 space for tiling textures.

I am running Windows 10. All the shaders are the default (diffuse+normal+specular) and I'm applying my material to static meshes rather than CSG. I can select faces on CSG in face mode and adjust the scale in the 'Objects' tab with no problem. When I select my material and view it in the material editor and adjust the mapping scale in there nothing changes at all, this is the same for CSG and static models. I have tried everything from making a new material and adjusting the mapping scale and then applying it to my meshes, I've tried looking at the API to see if there is a function for scaling a material too (can't find anything, plus that isn't really an ideal way to do it all in code)