Sunday, October 24, 2021

Procedural Buildings: Clothes Hanging in Closets

I showed some simple colored, 2D textured billboard shirts hanging in closets in the previous post. Various people, including my daughter, commented that they didn't look very much like real shirts. That's true! Fortunately, Paul Spooner offered to create some proper 3D models of shirts, pants, and clothes hangers. I was able to replace my temporary shirts and hangers with these improved models and add actual 3D volume to these objects, as well as an increased amount of variety.

Of course this wasn't trivial. There was some work involved in integrating new classes of 3D models into 3DWorld's object management framework. First, I had to add support for multiple 3D models of the same object type for building interiors, similar to what I had to implement with cars and people. Then I had to add flags for models to enable two sided lighting, change the rotation point, override the default texture, and extract the object name from the model filename. All of these features will likely be useful in the future. In fact I've already started incorporating some of these features into the other (existing) types of room objects.

Here are some screenshots showing the current contents of closets. There are five different hangers, a tee shirt, a long sleeve shirt, and hanging pants. Some of the shirts are textured, while others are brightly colored. The player can steal the clothes and hangers, as well as push/rotate them to the sides by walking through them in the closet.

The original shirt models, textured with a logo.

Adding some colored shirts, but keeping the pants gray. The yellow shirt on the left is too bright, so I've replaced it with dark green.

The shirts here are placed too close together, and the yellow and white shirts intersect. I've fixed this by replacing a shirt or pants with an empty hanger in this case.

Shirts on the left, pants on the right. Everything casts a shadow.

Shirts and pants hanging in a closet with a lamp and box at the bottom. Some of them have been rotated.

I think closet interiors would look better if there was better ambient lighting. I haven't quite figured out how to do that efficiently yet. I'll post updated screenshots if I can find a way to improve this. Also, the clothes hangers are very thin, which makes their shadows blocky when viewed up close. It would definitely work better if I could somehow make that circular light source a small area light rather than a point light as that would give it softer shadows.

What's the next step? Maybe adding clothes to dresser drawers?

1 comment:

  1. Really cool to see the models in the game! Glad it was helpful. I sent you an email, but maybe you didn't get it? You can reach me at mrpaulspooner@gmail.com

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