DarthParametric

Nice to see that MDLOps has finally emerged as a functioning, well-adjusted member of society. Only took a decade and a half, but better late than never. Props to ndix UR for getting it to the big 1.0.0.

So after a lot of iteration, here's some of what I have so far: It's annoying that the self-occlusion is seemingly so arbitrary. In some scenes there are no issues, then in another the same model has problems seeing the neck through the chin (for example). I wonder if the positioning of the characters and/or cameras needs to be altered as well.

TSL's HK only has textures specified by appearance.2da. The model itself has no default texture.

The rig for your female model seems to have some shenanigans going on: https://www.darthparametric.com/images/JC_RepSold_Fem_Rig.jpg I assume it was skinwrapped? The weights for the fingers are all messed up (as well as being assigned to the wrong bones).

No rush. I can live without it for now. Yep. Just tried now. No, it does not do the same. The grass is normal and where it is supposed to be. That works for me if it's easy to implement. It should also serve to remind me about it.

Cheers. Btw I noticed in TSL at least that the female officer body (N_RepOff_F) has exactly the same UV layout as the male officer (N_RepOff), but for some reason uses a 256x256 texture (N_RepOff_F01) instead of the male's 512x512 one (N_RepOff01). A simple appearance.2da patch you could add to your mod perhaps. I'll switch it for the full body versions I am doing.

Yeah, I've tried it before. It tends to flip out with any sort of mass migration. It's just less hassle to do it via relinking.

I'm working on some of the Republic heads for the Harbinger holos. I created a new female officer, as I never liked the dinky little cap the officers wear: I made a tweaked version of the admiral's cap, with rank bars of 2 (lieutenant) and 4 (captain) pips. It seems like pale skinned characters don't suffer as much with the transparency issues, I assume because the texture is acting in some sort of blending mode, which is bad news for dark skinned characters. Here's the revised variant of Comm_B_F for the Republic doctor: Seems like she'll need a full body model to avoid the neckline transparency. Can I make use of your new revised Republic female bodies for that JC?

KTool doesn't sort alphabetically. Just extract the entire BIF into a folder. You'll have a lot easier time finding things using Windows Explorer (or your nearest local OS equivalent).

I did it in Max and re-exported an ASCII. You could do it in a text editor if you were a masochist I guess. For somebody coding-inclined, the hierarchy component at least could be automated, but there's really no practical way to separate out the mouthbox without doing that in a 3D app anyway, so that is kind of moot. As you said, I just unlink everything from the base and then relink in the appropriate order. Here's the hierarchy of a rehash of comm_b_f I am trying: I think splitting out the nostrils and eye sockets is probably unnecessary based on my tests with the Harbinger's captain, but I will ascertain with further tests. Seeing as the mouthbox is always broken out into separate UV space, and the model will be split by UV islands, breaking out the mouthbox should generally be trivial. Clone the head mesh, select the Element sub-mode, pick the mouthbox and delete/invert selection and delete as appropriate.

If you are looking for work, try the requests forum. Plenty to do in there.

Put it in an archive (zip or 7z) and attach it to the post.

Can't tell because you supplied a JPG, but is the alpha of your original image also correctly set up for 16 frames? I'm guessing probably not.

Yes, it's all about how they calculate the depth buffer. It's not taking into account mesh transparency, which works in our favour in this case, but against us for windows, kolto tanks, etc. Although even then, the renderer should be working purely based on position of polys in the frame, not order of meshes in the model hierarchy. As with many other cases, perhaps this was some workaround to deal with the limitations of the original Xbox. Edit: So here's a first pass at a list of potential hologram replacements. Ones that use unique appearances are only listed once Revised. Listed all occurrences now. Bastila seems like she may need a LS and a DS version. The admirals I have already done the models for and have an installer in place. The ones with unique appearances could most easily be done as simple appearance.2da overrides. Ones like the Republic crew on the Harbinger will probably require custom entries to minimise clashes with other mods, and that might be best for some of the uniques as well, like the Jedi masters. Edit 2: And because you can never have too many spreadsheets, here's a refined model list: I think I will start with just head adjustments, as being simple model overrides they are the quickest and easiest to test. And also the most compatible with other mods. Pre-existing full body models can also be done. After that, it will probably require some in-game testing to determine if certain individuals require the full body treatment, or whether they can get away with just a tweaked head.

Nice, that works. Thanks. Yeah it figures I would try to make my life difficult when there is an easy solution staring me in the face. Thanks for checking out the Korriban scripts though.

These were my custom models. The different hierarchies were a result of me swapping bits around, linking and unlinking to the base. By chance it ended up with Carth's having the meshes at the top of the hierarchy. It would appear the game is rendering transparent meshes strictly in the order they appear in the model's hierarchy. A quick Google would suggest that this is a legacy of the way the OpenGL Z buffer works. The fact that neither Bioware or Obsidian implemented a fix for rendering multiple overlapping transparent meshes actually works in our favour in this instance, as we can use that to occlude the troublesome interior meshes like the eyeballs and mouthbox. Ironically if they did have the renderer working "properly" then the holograms would presumably be irredeemably bug-eyed.

You'll have to create custom textures, possibly unique per door, and bake the lighting into the diffuse (or fake the effect of such at least).

You can still get GMax for free from TurboSquid. But this is not the thread to be discussing it in.

The non-combatant NPCs are Neutral, set to No Interrupt, and still have the selection circles/health bars. I could actually set them as placeables, but I'm not that fussed on those ones having the health bars. Could I at least script the fighters to always stay at full HP? If they must have health bars, I'd prefer to have them full like all the neutral NPCs, not at 1 HP.

Possibly, but it should be easy enough to make your own custom one using any mod that takes your fancy. They all have unique appearance.2da entries, so you'd just need to adjust that to point to your preferred model and/or texture.

Yeah, pulled from the level assembled in Max. They are from 504ONDh.

Yeah, that's why they need to be lightmapped.

As long as it's power of 2, it will work fine (assuming it is set up correctly). Resolution is probably the bigger issue. The game can start to choke on large animated textures.

Carth still has the mouthbox issue, but that could be because the mouthbox is part of the head mesh. Skinned meshes are typically bottom of the hierarchy, but comparing the binary models I spotted something interesting: And here are the source hierarchies: I'll try breaking out the mouthbox to a separate mesh and putting it under the head mesh in the hierarchy. And try reorganising Cede's hierarchy in the same manner. Edit: Seems like that works fairly well. I need to make some adjustments to the mouthbox, as I accidentally included a strip of the bottom lip. He looks a bit fish-mouthed without the teeth/tongue not being visible, but that's probably about as good as it going to get. Here's the revised hierarchy: Ironically I probably added problems by switching from a full body model, like Jinger/Kreia had in the original Admiralty mod, to separate heads. I can switch back though, which should remove the issue of the neckline. How many other holograms are there? Presumably all the Harbinger officers would need to be redone. All the various people on Perargus. Cede and Carth of course. Bao-Dur towards the end-game. Who else? Edit 2: Here's a revised Cede: I tried switching off the "hide in hologram" flags for his teeth and tongue meshes and it seems like it is mostly ok under this new arrangement: There's a few glitches here and there. The ones around the nose corners seems like it might be because of the topology, so I'll see if I can tidy that up. After that, I'll try the full body version and see if that alleviates the neck issues. Edit 3: Here's the full body Cede: Now the head properly occludes the body, but at the price of some small overlap/intersection glitches. I guess that is the lesser of two evils. Although there's a weighting issue causing some of that - bottom row of neck verts weighted to necklwr_g instead of torsoUpr_g, causing it to clip into the torso. An easy fix. Actually it's the way the collar is set up on the torso. Because it is uneven, the bottom of the neck clips through to hide the join, which would normally be fine, just not on a hologram. Made some minor mesh adjustments to minimise it. Edit 4: OK, so bare minimum requirements seem to be a full body model, mouthbox split out, and correct mesh hierarchy. Seemed to work out well for the Harbinger Captain. I'll roll changes for the Harbinger crew holograms into the Admiralty Mod Redux when I get that sorted in the next month or two. There are still some minor glitches caused by overlapping geometry within the same mesh, like when the head tilts down and you see through the chin to the neck, but I can't see any way of resolving that. Around 95% clean is probably about as good as it is going to get.