CharacterFX is a character animation tool, created for gamers, artists, modellers and hobbyists. It allows you to breathe live into your meshes using skeletal animation and advanced tools like Inverse Kinematics or Weighted Vertices, but still it is easy enough to use for all levels of computer graphic artists.

CharacterFX is especially usefull for game developers who need an affordable animation solution. It comes with exporters that allow you to easily get your animated characters into DarkBasic Professional or Blitz 3D, and a SDK is available allowing custom import and export filters.

From their site:

Quote:From now on, CharacterFX is available as Freeware - you can use it free of charge, without any restrictions, for as long as you like. If CharacterFX asks you to register, you can use the following registration details to continue using it free of charge:

Username: CFX4FREE
Registration Key: 5b2fe4

Download link:
http://www.insanesoftware.de/index.php?p...nloads.php

wow!
really great recourses (spell?)!
also read about Gile[s], but i dont even know what lightmapping is so...
anyway thanks for sharing

hehehe, cool! I'm glad you found the links useful.
Recourses is very close, in Spanish it's "Recursos" so sounds familiar too. In English it's "resources"

Lightmapping is the process in which shadows generated in your level are "baked" on top of the diffuse map information on a separate texture file called a "lightmap" which includes only the lighting info. Then the engine mixes both texture maps in realtime and you get a level with precalculated shadows at very low resource consumption. This is how it was done in older versions of engines like Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, etc. But now, with the power of newer CPUs and GPUs things can be calculated in realtime and everything is dynamic.

Info on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightmap

And a couple of images:
Textured-only level:


Textured+Lightmap info level:


This way you have the whole level's illumination solved out. The problem comes when you need dynamic effects like day-night cycles

cheers!

Alvaro

cool!
but did you make all those models yourself? :O

because i suck at graphics, and i am having a hard time finding any free models on the internet... so i only have the models/characters provided with esenthel, to play around with ...

anyway, thanks for the explanation of the lighmapping thing
though i think the "automatic" lightning in Esenthel is more suited for my level

Yup I made this model for the deled summer 2008 competition, you can check the progress log here:
http://delgine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3306

Deled is a great tool as well since it's bot a lowpoly modeler and a lightmapper.
http://www.delgine.com/

In fact, I just remembered it's got a free version that I'm going to post in the tools section

About lightmaps, you're right. The opposite thing happens to me. I'm so used to lightmaps that I feel weird work with newer engines, hehehe. But Esenthel seems to do very well with the automatic lighting so I'll start learning about it.

regards,
Alvaro

cool xD
just to be sure: DeleD is a world editor right?
and can it be converted to .wrld, for use in Esenthel in some way? it would really be cool with something a little more advanced, and easy to use (no offence Esenthel)...

Im not familiar with the .wrld format. Is it Esenthel's world maps format?
If so I guess it must be similar to how you handle meshes in Esenthel in its mesh editor, drop a supported 3d format into it and save as .mesh. deled exports to .x, 3ds, obj, b3d (via plugins) so I guess you may import one of these into Esenthel's world editor and resave as .wrld? Grzegor please correct me if I'm wrong

But indeed, it's a world editor and offers nice modeling options. Even the free lite version is powerful. I used it for a long time before purchasing the pro version

here's another shot I created for another of the competitions held there, both the models and the world is modeled and lightmapped entirely within deled:


I'll test some stuff with the world editor to see how things go.

cheers!

Alvaro

yes the .wrld is World Editor custom format
to WE you can put only .mesh format, (other ones like .3ds .ase .obj .x .wrl need to be imported in Mesh Editor first)
then when you've got the .mesh you can create a object in WE, and set it's mesh to the file previously imported.

When I'll find the time I'll make a quick video tutorial showing how to put stuff, it's really simple, but always its better to see how its done at first time

mmm great! With your explanation I can start playing around

regards,
Alvaro