chris cunnington

I have been thinking lately, that I have been working with DIFs for nearly 2 years… give or take a few months. I can still remember the first few days/months of battling my way through multiple tools (Quark, Cartography Shop, etc) all to try and achieve some level of artistic quality, precise placement and finally ease of use/production. Finally after loads of work with colleagues we finally got a stable pipeline for making DIFs from 3DS Max.

Anyway, pipelines aside.. there are some specific things you should remember when creating models that will eventually be converted to DIF. These 8 tips are general DIF & BSP production guides for the novice.

1. Don’t expect to model meshes as you have previously in other 3D Apps. For example using welding, extruding and beveling!
2. Complex shapes are built from simple primitive geometry like Cubes & Wedges…. its sorta like playing with Lego Blocks.
3. These Simple Primitive shapes become known as Brushes.
4. Brushes must be Convex.
5. All faces on Brushes should always be Coplanar.
6. All model information must be exported to a .map file before conversion to .dif. Its not one easy step.
7. A texture ‘null.jpg’ can be applied to make a specific face or entire brushes invisible, but retain its collision properties. There are other special textures, forcefield.jpg, trigger.jpg and origin.jpg
8. Multiple DIF models are much cheaper for Torque to render than multiple DTS meshes.

With these guides in mind, a great tool to use (which we incorporate into our pipeline) is Delgine. Its a handy tool for getting you into the production of DIFs and has a Torque Export Plugin.

Related Posts:

1. Orphaned Polygons in Torque – Part 2 of 3
2. XRef and My Workflow
3. Orphaned Polygons in Torque – Part 3 of 3

~ by Chris on May 12, 2008.

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Tags: 3D, 3D Max, Art, Artist, DIF, DTS, Engine, Entertainment, Game, Game Art, Game Artist, GameDev, Games, Orphan, Orphaned, Pipeline, Polygons, Technology, Torque, Torque Game Engine