Issue with Hive Viewer

[Retera]

I'm seeing that this model Altar of Stars does not render correctly. This seems true both in Retera model Studio (which copied a lot of code from Hive's "view in 3d" button) and also in the "View in 3D" button itself.

Does anybody know why this doesn't render correctly? What part of the render specification is unknown here?

 

[Wareditor]

This is related to this material

Material {
        PriorityPlane -91,
        Layer {
            FilterMode Blend,
            TwoSided,
            static TextureID 14,
            static Alpha 0.5,
        }
        Layer {
            FilterMode Blend,
            TwoSided,
            static TextureID 15,
            TVertexAnimId 0,
            Alpha 3 {
                Linear,
                GlobalSeqId 1,
                0: 0.689999,
                1500: 0.579999,
                3000: 0.689999,
            }
        }
    }

Changing the second layer filtermode to None make the texture appear.

They are a bunch of other things that don't render correctly (with some subtle differences between RMS and Hive's viewer).
For instance, ribbons are rendered incorrectly in both.

 

[Retera]

For instance, ribbons are rendered incorrectly in both.

Can you give an example so we can fix the viewer or one of the other tools? Even if it is only in one of the projects, I really like the idea of a know good source of truth that does everything correctly in every known way that anybody can copy from. For me that's mostly been the WarsmashModEngine repo in the last few years.

But even if we picked Hive's viewer instead, it would be great to have a source of truth.

 

[Wareditor]

Sadly there isn't a fixed and stable source of truth. To make it simple I would say the game is what we should look at since users of the Hive viewer or RMS expect the model to match what they will see in game. Of course this can get complicated when one the game's update introduce a visual bug. But broadly speaking the game should be the reference (this is a much bigger topic which I don't want to go into in this post).

Concerning ribbons, it's pretty clear when you compare how ribbons appear in the game and how they appear in the viewer or RMS.
The different parts of the ribbon have seams that shouldn't be that visible. Good models to check this out are the haunted mine, the spirit tower or the blade master.
The viewer is much worse than RMS between. Maybe I had already mentioned the issue to you before and you might have already done some improvements.

 

[Retera]

I would say the game is what we should look at

I don't know what this means. You included a screenshot of the World Editor program on Reforged, which is bugged and renders ribbons the wrong color (darker red/orange). The only game whose source code I have that I can "look at" is the Warsmash game. I used that code to make Warsmash Model Viewer, which I took screenshots of above. This seems to be working fine for the models you indicated, which means there are specific software differences we could review in the code leading to the different visual outputs, which can then be resolved even if I do not happen to remember what they are.

Despite this, ingame (on Warsmash) and in the Warsmash Model Viewer, the Altar of Stars model does not seem to visually match the author's intended appearance. Do you have source code or understanding of a program we could point to an copy from, or a change we could make to the render code rather than to the model data you pasted above, that might help with this?

 

[Wareditor]

I don't know what this means

You don't understand the part where people using viewer / modelling tools for a game want the model to look like it does in that game?

The point of mentioning ribbons and other issues was to say that we don't have perfect renderers out there and another bug is not a surprise.
So my view is that you have a bug in your renderer with a nice repro case which should make it quite easy to debug and reason about.
The help of the community might be needed after that if you fail to find the reason why it's not working.

NB: I don't use/have Warsmash so I don't know how things are rendered there, it's nice if you improved the rendering there compared to RMS.

 

[Retera]

You don't understand the part where people using viewer / modelling tools for a game want the model to look like it does in that game?

I know what that means from a user standpoint and used to do that in the past for hundreds of hours, but am at a point in my life where I wish to move past this and to interact only with liberated software where we can read and understand the code and then operate with understandings rather than tests and measurements of a black box. It's a choice I'm making that puts me in a situation where I don't know how to use what you're suggesting, because of how obtuse it seems compared to solving problems by reading software directly.

For example, given this direction I am trying to go in life, I would understand how to utilize your suggestion if someone posted the source code of Warcraft III on the Hive. I think someone already sent it to me on Discord in some form, but it's some downstream reproduction and not the original and so reading it is sometimes difficult.