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Comic was 100% canon in the previous Expanded Universe canon, and written by Chris Avellone himself. Miraluka are also long established as having no eyes, going back to the 90s here. So my vote would be for that as well, although I understand the technical challenge. I don't think it would look too weird, and you could include an option with a bag over her head. It should even be possible to unlock her headgear slot and make that an equippable item for her.

OK, I take it back.

Really though, my reasoning was more with this Vader comic I picked up and read a while back. Rated well but devolved into 12 year old boy super cyborg fantasy stuff. Never actually read the comic that the image is from, was just generalizing based on that experience and others regarding EU books.

Anyway, I think I'll leave my comment there as I don't want to get too sidetracked.

More on track: if she wore something more like a face plate, ornamental armor, that would work as well I think. Kinda like a super hero mask in that it is molded to the face, maybe with fake eyes...

@ Malikor: well she plays an adviser role to Darth Nihilus whom she is seen advising her master at times regarding the Jedi -- vague memory. She is also not really a marauder type from my recollection. Meaning, her lightsabre isn't her only tool that she uses to solve problems.

Thinking about it, having eyes that are sealed over with smooth skin -- where you can clearly see the bumps of the eyes -- depending on the texture work, could look both beautiful along with unnerving. And legends altogether is not canon, and I wouldn't hold the comic up as a standard. I find in particular a lot of the comic book "lore" to be rather unsatisfactory -- juvenile writing pandering to early teen boys.

I think she is meant to be like a "counselor" type, and not really a warrior. So thinking about what works in that context might be best. So, a helmet that fits that as long as it doesn't feel like something a warrior would wear..?

Still, it is your work and I think as a creator that at the end of the day, it has to be something your happy with.

Yeah, I'm still having the same problem. Even after properly renaming.

I'm wondering if I'm doing something else wrong or if my exported metadata is somehow making the load of the ASCII hang in MDLOps.

But upon further inspection, it's hanging on every read and write. Is there an option that I screwed up?

Someone also said to try a new head so this is the concept for it. It ended up coming out really European when I wanted more half Asian.

:|

 

I do like the messy bob although a more clean look would be easier to model.

 

Sorry for the late update, I've been sick since Yesterday so I'm just working on this when I can. But I appreciate all the help. When I do figure this out, I'm going to throw you guys credit on the actual mod.

You guys are the best.

A new head would definitely work better with the new body, and I do like the above design. However, creating a new head is even more a complicated workflow to creating a new body. You may be better off finding an existing head that matches the above, and then modifying that one with a new texture in order to replace the existing one. Someone else who has done it can speak from experience as to what is possible and how difficult it is to clarify.

On a side note "The Miraluka were are a near-Human species that differed from Humans in that they lacked eyes, only retaining vestigial eye sockets." From: starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Miraluka

Personally I don't like the no eyes or only eye sockets look. And would be perfectly fine with her having eyes that don't look like they actually see anymore. White pearly orbs for a non-dark sided character, off-white -- like grey rotting teeth -- for a dark side character. But, I raise the point as someone likely will as it wouldn't strictly be SW Legends "lore."

lol it seems even after properly naming everything I can't get it to work properly. I'm a failure, guys. Haha

 

Welcome to the world of KotOR series modding, where the tools and pipeline is dated and incomplete, simple changes have overly complicated workflows if not being impossible to do, and most of the technical knowledge about the game model format and how to effectively use these tools, largely resides in the heads of a few modders  .

But I'm sure that the problem can be resolved, as it is nothing that hasn't been managed before and your getting some experienced and insightful help.

The work looks good so far; definitely consider reworking the Visas head texture to better match the new threads.

You could try 0 instead of 1. I'm not sure if that's a valid value, but worth a try. I would also suggest trying it in conjunction with those test textures I posted earlier, to see if resolution has any influence.

 

For our more programmatically-inclined denizens, I am wondering if a potential solution might be utilising a wrapper like GLIntercept to change GL_CLAMP calls to GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE.

You mean an injector -- API hooking -- along the lines of ReShade?

Something I've thought about playing with to see what could actually be added to the game beyond merely injecting post process full-screen shader effects. Never got around to trying anything myself; work took over.

I ran the experiment also, and had some similar and different results.

 

Same: different resolution didn't seem to make any difference.

 

Different: with DP's textures, I don't get a black line, I get a red line, which suggests that ... w/ my setup ... the texture image is tiling and there is some bleed from the right side of the image.

 

It seemed more noticeable the further away you are.

 

Here are my test images:

 

mission-face-line.7z

 

Also, I've had a CM_SpecMap envmap TXI in place from the beginning, using all TGA texture images.

I think in some cases I  tried to solve it by actually adding a strip of pixels to the other side of the texture -- in cases where the uv butted up against the very edge of the texture. In case it was a wrapping / bleeding issue. Believe it made some difference in various cases. Hard to recall as this is from around 2 years ago if not longer than that.

@ olnorton: is your new texture the same resolution as the old one, and if not, what is it?

When it comes to retextures of heads based on vanilla textures, I do something along the lines of 4x the original size. I think that may be 1024x1024; though I would recommend at least 2048x2048 with people playing the game at higher resolutions being the norm. When the mipmaps are generated by the video card (opengl) they should be of a larger resolution and hopefully affect whether the black line appears and how severe in effect it is if so -- if ndix UR's analysis of the issue is correct.

Try it with your TGA.

My brain is not working 100% due to lack of food, but, if you mean TPC (?) the KoTOR image format, it has its own TXI and the engine could be overriding it. My retextures are a combo of TGA and TXI files overriding originals in the Override folder. So far haven't bothered to convert to the native engine format due to tool / pipeline limitations affecting workflow.

EDIT: oh, just hit me! Most of my work is in TSL and that is actually a different engine to KoTOR -- especially when it comes to rendering. This *may* limit the effectiveness of a specmap TXI solution.

So ill reiterate:

If you add a TXI file for the textures in question that has a line that specifies it needs to use a specularity map, you may find that you no longer have a black line as the black is replaced by the spec map used by the shader. May not be perfect, however, it doesn't require all the head models to be re UV mapped and textured so that there isn't a (black) seam in the middle of their faces. 

I mention it again as I don't think anyone has tried it yet and I currently am not able to -- pretty sure it works from past experience.

My understanding for why this issue never really goes away is that the game seems to maybe use black pixels when a mipmap is blending with pixels outside the border of the image. That is just a theory though.

I've noticed the issue as well; decided it was a UV mapping issue but mipmaps themselves didn't come to mind. Seems very likely it is based on your reasoning.

From memory, if you use textures that also make use of a specularity texture via a TXI file, the black line will be less visible if not negated -- depends on resolution. As any retextures I do generally make use of one -- beyond those that need to use the alpha channel for transparency, like Atton -- so I find this problem disappears for me for the most part.

As a scientist, I encourage healthy scepticism in the face of claims made without any evidence. Hopefully such evidence will be forthcoming soon™. But this is not really the place to discuss it. Apologies for hijacking the thread.

No problem -- I know you're a capable modder who knows what they're talking about!

If I'm being a bit of a smart arse with my replies, it's because it is a really slooow day in the office.

Yes, I have.

Well, as long as you have 

Its a legal thing, we don't want to be seen trying to sell other peoples work. But I get it, Deadlystream costs a significant amount of money to run every month, so I see where it is tempting to try and monetize what you love. Thanks for understanding.

 

-T

No problem; I understand.

This is incorrect. The engine does support tangent space normal maps. What the community currently lacks is a tool to convert them to a game-usable format. That will change in the near future however.

Have you seen the engine using tangent space normal maps..?

If it is only a reference of it in the model file, then, that doesn't mean it is supported. Sure at one point that was the plan before they disabled it as being to processing intensive for the hardware of the time -- think original Xbox.

Anyway, if it is more than the references I've seen in the model file, then point me to the info and I might play around with the problem with a tool.

Yeah, so I guess that makes the issue clear enough for me and where I should be devoting my time with.

Though what I came up with as an idea could work, it would mean the end of the mod here on DeadlyStream; especially as we're not even discussing the most hairy part of it -- that I still need to look into the legalities of.

I may do the odd work to progress the mod, however, most of it will be to tie off lose ends so that I can release it. The model tool I'll likely work on, but mostly to develop my tool development skills and, in case I want to take my idea (change of direction) further.

The reality is that I have a finite amount of time, and modding, is no longer the most effective use of that time.

To quote the site rules:

 

 

That being said, feel free to discuss that sub-topic over on the KOTOR Subreddit.  

Yeah case in point ^.

Though you are assuming the mod will not be free. You can have a mod that is for free however people have provide the developer with funds to assist with its development. Not sure that is actually a mod that is being sold based on the reading of the site rules... care to comment SH?

Literally, first posters are the most sketchy crew on planet earth, but hey if this is still being worked on, I do 3D modeling and texturing.

For what it's worth, I do a lot of work in Zbrush, Maya, 3D Coat for retopo, Substance Painter for Texturing, Photoshop for texture editing, and Marvelous Designer for clothing.

I don't know if there's a poly limit for the KOTOR games but I'm so down for an epic collab.

Break me in senpai.

Yeah, 3D texturing painting is largely useless for the KoTOR games. If your experience is what it seems to be, I think you would find working on a KoTOR mod to be rather limiting. Regardless, you should post a link to a portfolio of work if you want people to be interested in collaborating with you.

To explain further the texturing issue, the best the engine can do is basically specular bump maps. No real normal maps, why most of the work posted on the thread is all diffuse + specular maps. The model pipeline -- original model out to editable format, and, original/new model into KoTOR format -- isn't completely supported. There seem to be newer tools like kotormax and mdledit, however, this is likely just building upon the old code base -- FYI have used the tools myself -- which in my opinion is just a flawed mess due to a number of gross assumptions and lack of know-how of when they were made.

I've been working on my own model export tool, and though I can scrape the time I have put into it and come to something like 3 months, it's been 3 months over around 2 years -- if not longer than that. It isn't complete yet, and to be quite frank, I'm not sure I want to create a tool that reimports the models back so they can be used in KoTOR/TSL. That is just a limiting dead end, especially as so much time has transpired since I started this mod, that I don't think the work is any longer novel. There are lots of texture replacer mods in particular, that do comparable things to my own. The other elements of the mod, are again, done to some extent by other mods. It doesn't feel very fresh to me.

I have another idea in mind regarding the use of the TSL models via the tool I am working on that I doubt that DeadlyStream will be happy about. I'm on the fence about it as mods don't pay, and though I have an idea of how funding could be raised to pay for the mod work -- to fund a team -- I think lots of folks would take issue with it. Not just here on DeadlyStream.

So at this point, I do not know whether I will continue working on the mod. I am more likely to work further on the model tool along with use my game development skills working on another project that I can potentially put up via Steam. Meaning, lead to a sustainable income without being someone's employee -- corporate slave.

Cool. New tools. Definitely looking forward to playing around with the PNG to TPC converter at some point. Would be better if it had a GUI front-end, but, as the code is available and in C#... I guess someone can make one for it at some point.

There's likely a few solutions to add TGA support to your tool.

The alpha channel in texturing can be used for a number of things -- anything that is a black and white map really. So transparency, specularity, etc. Newer engines use it to store other things like ambient occlusion. Usually it is used to store everything but transparency it seems .

 

No worries, I will release them. I just want to do a few extra colors

 

Meanwhile, I've been testing KotorMax and MDLedit. An updated version of NWmax and MDLops, which was the tool I used for about everything 3D related.

I now have used the tool for a first serious attempt at getting a new area in the game. The experience has been great.

 

Things work pretty good from the go. I only had to correct a few bothersome meshes; still have a few left. Looks like the rescaling I did on some of my machines got lost on the exporting or compiling.

Walk-mesh creating has been a blast as well. I don't think I ever got a good result from the very first test.

 

Camera gets blocked of as well; which used to be an annoying affair to get corrected. Often meaning things got broken beyond repair sometimes.

I do still have some issues, with my Light maps. It looks like UVs got destroyed. I might have done to many 3D meshes in one go for the tools to handle.

 

So I cheated a bit. I just turned all of my light maps in a neutral grey. Which at least made my area visible for inspection.

 

This is an updated model for my Scrapyard mod. It's the landing bay. So far only the Ebon Hawk and Barracuda, use their proper Light maps; all the other stuff has the "cheating" lightmap applied

 

MIND, this is sort of an alpha or beta build. I'm very aware of the faults!

 

 

 

 

 

Nice work! Good to see that there is more progress being made with making new areas with updated tools.

Would be interested in playing around with those when they're released.

I can't recall which were the models. I knew that there were multiple versions of the interiors. However, they aren't all identical.

I didn't fix anything, I just replaced .

Out of curiosity, how did you go about fixing it? The reason I went with the hex editing fix is because it literally was a mesh that was in the wrong place. Didn't have a texture applied, at least I don't think it did.

How many Ebon Hawk models are there in the game?

Yet still managed to release it to the public before you did, how about that

Yes, well, that was intentional.

Per your method of hex editing We talked about this, but I thought you never made it. Now that I know more about programming and stuff I could do it myself

Funny, don't recall having to fix that one with hex editing. Remember it just needing a little lateral thinking .

Anyway, took you guys long enough.

Any word on fixing these? 

I fixed many of those years ago. Some need better tools to get the fixes created.

AnimMeshes were only used with NWN1.

Thanks, I suspected as much having not seen a single model that makes use of them. Now just to implement animation events upon finding a model that makes use of them!

Does anyone know of a TSL model that has an (161)  AnimMesh, or, are these only used in NWN..?

I wasn't talking about the ingame cutscenes. I was refering to the BIK movies.

Oh, well some of the BIK movies would be difficult to make but yeah that makes sense.

 

But I'd still recommend that mod just to check out because it makes the in-game cutscenes SO much better.

Yes, those would be hard to recreate, and, I'm not inclined to do so.

In my opinion, when games use pre-rendered "cinematic" cutscenes, they are missing the interactive and real-time point of games. It should all be done in-engine, in real-time. They may have had an excuse for this more than a decade ago, but, they really don't these days.