xander2077

Ah red hat, one of the first encounters i had with linux! those were the days. where you had to start the desktop from command-line, install every driver manually (or write them on your own from copying forum posts) and the packages were all rpms and a mish mash of varying styles and goofiness. Many linux distros were still in its awkward stage back then, and some distros still have a similar awkwardness.You also had to pay for things that are usually free now. But enough reminiscing... I believe there may be support for TK windowing in linux kernel (GTK maybe?) but it for sure has to be in the correct case consistently, and that is usually the issue (besides the dotnet fiasco in many exes), not necessarily the fact that Tk is present, but that there was a case discrepency. Linux is case sensitive, while windows is case agnostic, so a script can reference something in all caps and even if the dll or the exe is in all lower case it will still work in windows, but not in linux. linux all the references have to match 100% or something will not work. Now in games like Kotor, where internally case may not match, the game engine translates or accepts the case discrepencies because they are hidden from the OS, for instance an all upper case reference inside the model tree, doesnt effect the game negatively because it is handled internally, but for something like mdlops which does more of the work externally in wine or mono, with perl or python acting as a go between as well sometimes, (with it translating code for the windows executable), it almost demads the case consistency. I also like that you suggested commenting out certain things, but i will have to look into it further to figure it all out. If the code had to be retooled in the exe itself, then i dont have the things i need to do that any more (i used to) just commenting out in the perl script is easy as pie.

im not sure if those can be added quite right with a belt hook. the hands is even more complicated because the models are not set up to even be that way, so that would definitely be a texture swap for hands. but even that is complicated in this case. for the armbands or the forearm shields, those would have to be additional models over any existing body model arms. i think the rule is one texture per mesh so they cant be in the same mesh, but i am not sure if they can be in the same mdl or not. so those may be something that can have a hook added and actually work but im not sure. and then there is the issue of them overlapping the belts on robes and armor. if they were already integrated then it would be easy as pie, but the models seem to only be for the turtable view in the inventory/uprgade bench. thats why i was thinking maybe they could be used in a visible manner on the character, if higher detailed versions were grafted into the skinned models in some way and then separated into their own object so they can reference the correct texture file. for the unused texture, i have no idea what i will do. i made a nice model but the texture does not work on it like i had hoped, so i have to approach it from a diffferent angle, perhaps more like some welding goggles. i can always reuse that other model for a new set of googles. as far as the colors go, they can be changed to be more pleasing to the eye, but based on the same design elements as vanilla. however whether they will line up with the models they need to texture is another thing. really it boils down to the limitations of the engine. it may not like new hooks on body models or heads. it may go haywire and reject them or even crash in the attempt. then there is an issue with how to handle the belts. if they replace the existing drawn on belts or existing mesh belt parts on models, then those have to be added in as default belts somehow as well as new items in their own right. which can be done in the inventory view, but might be a handful on the actual characters. the reason this is an interesting concept for me is because if it works in some form, then it might enable a whole new range of items, and enable some wearable antique sith or jedi artifacts that would otherwise be very hard to recreate in a believable manner. somthing like this will be largely trial and error, so until i have proof of concept, there is no way to know what will happen.

Well i think maybe if Linux games mods work better when everything is upper or lower case, that maybe for Mac it is similar. That is why sometimes when i type in lower case, i get carried away and just dont use the shift key, because i am so used to typing in lower/upper case for mods. But i found this does make a difference, in any Nix based operating system. So when i install a game, i usually change the case of all the override files to lower case so they can be overwritten easier, and then linux knows what to do easier. But editing the 2da usually requires it to be uppercase from what i can tell in my limited experience for Kotor on a Nix system. Since windows is case agnostic, it doesnt matter how it is edited, it will probably still work, which is probably why the original modders did not have an issue, and why there is a discrepency between any Nix installations bugs and windows bugs that are case related. However i do not know if this will help the OP since they never specified whether or not their OS was windows or Unix.

Wow, i missed this reply. Thanks! I am by no means a coder, and i have a hard time with the terminal sometimes since im more familiar with command prompt, but i would be delighted to remove the dependencies that dont need to be there! now if i could only do that with Ktool! anyway, this is something i have to try carefully when i have the time and urge to do it. And as a side note, the lightsabers have to be imported and exported (AFAIK) with version 5 of mdlops, so it would be kind of cool to see all of the good features from the last 3 versions combined into one, and the bad stuff eliminated. Maybe make it so the import is a bit more complicated and you can choose to invoke the mdlops version you want as the conversion script? It makes for a more complicated GUI too, so that is why i am wondering if it were even possible.

I have been delving into the game models a lot lately, and there are some things i always wondered about. Now it seems to me that there are some models that never got fully implemented, or perhaps could be utilized a bit differently. One is the belts. I cant remember right off the top of my head but i think that a lot of the items have a spinning animation and these belt models were intended to not only do that but appear in the upgrade workbench. I could be wrong but i think it would be kind of cool. But not only that, has anyone tried to make the belts a wearable item? Im not even sure how that would be pulled off, since there is no "belt hook" on the body types, and it would probably clash with any drawn in belts on armor and robe textures. just an idea i was thinking about. (im pretty sure the belts themselves would have to be grafted into the various armor and robe types which would then increase the number of body models exponentially) Then there is the light collar. it has to be cheated in, but there is a model for it and it probably was intended to spin somewhere in the inventory or upgrade bench. But that is easy to make a wearable, just may not look right the way the model is. Finally there is an unused mask texture, that is called I_Neuralband.tga, and i was really curious if anyone has ever found ,in a separate location in the game archives, a model that goes to this mask texture. It lines up with almost nothing. It sort of works on a couple of the models but doesn't. I think it was the prototype texture for the Neuralband2 design, and the model was scrapped but the texture remains in the game. I do have plans to create a model that will work with this texture, but i am not sure yet how i will make it look. It is hard to judge what the appearance should be, and it is definitely trying to reverse engineer something with no clue about the shape or dimensions. From what i can tell the model structure seems to be something similar to the light collar, but different, to the aural amps, but different... and even a few elements of the actual neural band that made it into the game, but not quite. My first guess is they are goggles, and i have a hunch some of the textures were intended for the inside where the player cant see them, like all the other masks/goggles (yes they do have this level of detail for some reason, maybe for the spinning animation? can you imagine why? maybe a K1 FPS?). And this also lends credence to the thought that maybe all the headgear was also originally intended to be upgradeable. So anyway, i guess the question is, since K1 and K2 share the same mask models, has anyone ever found a model yet that goes to that texture? It may not be in the items.bif, but it could have been put somewhere else that i am not aware of on accident/purpose/oops.

is this from TSL? that is god awful. Just about reminds me of something out of Daggerfall.

Yes, and you have to read it in your head with a Yoda voice...

Sure, I will get right on it with a screen cap of Vandar before and after. Sorry in game would be something we already saw. But before I do... Haunted Yoda says HI!!!! I tell ya, this is going to become an internet meme

Since I am awaiting some feedback related to my masks mod and this would be off topic, I am posting another WIP, a very small mod, and what will be an experiment in skinned models. Basically just tweaking some of the topology of Vandar so he looks more like his species should. I lengthened the ears, reduced the scale of the eyes, and lowered the jowls a bit. No details were added. I have yet to test it in game. Before I do so, I have to make sure I have tackled correct weighting protocols in blender that work in the game. By request here is an after and before since I screwed up and got the cut and paste backwards. Well I fixed it so it is now before and after...

Well, i for one dont see an issue as long as the mod owner is allowed to claim their work. I have noticed lately there are a lot of mods dying for K1 especially. Many dead links, sites down or repo'd by the service provider, and trying to navigate what is left of the fiefront archive is very intimidating at times. I also noticed that some of the old filefront archive links have been taken over by other gaming sites and no mods exist on those. One was a new gaming ezine i never heard of before yesterday. No mod links there. I don't think this is the first time Nexus has stepped up to save mods that will be lost forever otherwise. They also did the same when Planet Elder Scrolls was lost forever. I know many of my uplods were lost on that site and i can never get those back, so what they could save of them i appreciate. I certainly was not in any position at the time to do it myself with RL issues to contend with. When that happened, their reupload system was kind of lacking and rushed, but with their new approach i am more confident the appropriate modders will be credited. There is also something to be said for redundancy, anyone familiar with RAID or backing up a server would see the benefit of that. I would certainly rather navigate the Nexus for any mods not contained here than something like game bananna or lone bullet (which often seems like it is another rescue attempt). However i would really rather see those mods rescued here instead of going to the nexus for Kotor mods.

OK, double post i know but the first entry is for overall thread reference and discussion framing, and i feel should not be cluttered with my own piece of the discussion. One of the things we were discussing in another thread is how to add detail to an existing vanilla model and not really change the art style a whole lot. Just my opinion, but i feel as though the soul of the game is in its overall style, and i try to keep the essence of that in my mods. So how does that apply to modeling? Well, lets say for instance you want to update a certain aspect of the game, but dont want to depart too much from the original look. A lot of that has to do with modeling. Lets face it: models in K1&2 are by far not always the best when it comes to detail. They did a pretty good job with the character models, and though some of those need an update, the really dated models or what i like to think of as rushed, were a lot of the items, and particularly wearables and weapons. They are rather blocky and can really stick out like a sore thumb when viewed along side the texture upgrades in recent years. So, how to change that? One way is to create a new model. Of course this can appear daunting at first, but it can be fun. How have i done it? I usually bring an old vanilla model into blender and just update it a bit. First i import it, then i select all faces or vertices and remove doubles. This makes the mesh one solid piece to work with and helps defne the shape better. Once that is accomplished i orbit the scene so i am looking at it from what we would consider the front of the model. However most of the models related to characters are facing away from the modeler initially, so the back is the front and the front is the back. Next i choose to work on the left half. So if i was facing the back of the model, as if i were wearing it or standing in the perspective of a head or body, its left would be the left i mean. The reason for working on one half is to allow for symmetry. That way it reduces the time to completion. symmetry can be achieved many ways but for my purposes it is simply something i can do from the drop downs every so often to see the results. Next i choose what i want to change. say a model was based on a cylinder with 6 sides, that is supposed to represent a curve, but that curve looks blocky in the game. Lets use the heavy targeting optics as an example. It looks like a pair of heavy sungalsses, or something from popular mechanics years ago in an article about virtual reality goggles. Well, there is a visor portion that should be a curve, but instead it is blocky. To update the look and achieve the curved appearance we can use a simple trick and keep the basic vanilla model form. So i select either the vertical edge loops around the front and back of the goggles, or the vertical edges that are in the same loop, or vertices in the z axis orientation in the same loop, and i bevel that edge or vertex (vertices). this smooths the corner out and gives it a more smooth appearance more akin to a curve than a corner. I only do this on very few of the edges. To clean them up, there has to be a bit more editing. So any additional faces created by the bevel around the face corners we want to keep, have to be gotten rid of along the sharp edges that should be sharp. so i can either connect the vertices on that edge to follow the crisp edge of the curve, and then merge vertices to get rid of the unnecessary faces, or simply merge them in the center to keep them in line. This is a good way to increase details without going overboard. Using smooth materials on the faces will export with the model and hide any blockiness left after adding the new subdivisions to select edges, and it will appear to be a lot more high poly than it really is in game. i do not subdivide faces because that is not usually necessary. Anyway that is one of the ways i like to increase details on a vanilla model. Plus it is a good way to practice polygon budgeting and also refine technique. Sometimes i actually delete portions of a model and replace just that part with a new more detailed part and graft it in to the existing model. So for instance the infragoggles: I removed the original pentagonal collector tubes on the front (way too blocky), and replaced them with a higher detailed cylinder and then spliced it into the model. of course they have to be UV mapped, since they wont have any texture assigned until it is done, but that is another post. But that is all it takes. Nothing else really needed more detail. Parts that are supposed to be squared off were left alone.

This thread was suggested by SithSpecter to create a discussion about different modeling techniques and theory. Some of these ideas are largely dependent on the modeling program one uses, but they can also be translated to other modeling programs. Though the termonology may be different, a lot of the same ideas apply. While there is not always an equivalent function between one platform or another, it is good to compare notes and bounce ideas, that can help other modders and perhaps create some new perspectives on modeling in general. Please bear with me because i have a really wonky spell check. I have attemtped to write the opening to this thread three times and for some reason it keeps eating my text before i can post. So i will have to be careful and post little chunks here and there to avoid that issue. To open the discussion: What modeling techniques do you use? What is your standard workflow from start to finish? Are there any interesting things you do to improve a model or create a new one? Are you looking for ideas or tips? Well this is probably the palce to discuss that. The thread will be comprehensive, so to get the most bang fo your buck, i would suggest gleaning every page of it you can to get ideas. So without further adieu, let the discussion begin!

well i can explain why i did in another thread, but like you suggested it would be best for another thread. sure lets do that!

i second that, i was looking for this version as well. thank you Darth P.

yes, that is one way to do it, however if you want to use the vanilla model as a base and not a completely new one, it can mess up the UVs in blender to try and unwrap it in a square planar orientation. for example, the equivalent to that is unwrapping it like a box in blender, so it unwraps it like you said sort of... but all the islands are stacked on top of each other and in the center, very small, and it takes a lot of patience and work to get it all sorted out. but i can see your point in max or other programs, this is a good way to do it. instead, when i try to retain the original UVs in that case, or very very close to them, i modify them with a few tricks here and there so the orientation is similar to vanilla, but not identical. and that is usually due to new geometry to smooth the model out a bit and make it less blocky. the only reason i would even consider that is for peple who want the original texture to work with older models, which is sometimes the case, but not always. and that is why i chose to do it that way for my masks overhaul, on the off chance someone could not handle the new models. i suppose a lower resolution can help in that case as well, but that is in the works. personally i would not recommend the new textures on old models, but it is an attempt to accomodate everyone i can. another approach, when making a new model in blender to replace a vanilla one, is to use the smart UV project plugin, and this unwraps it more like what you described in your planar square map orientation, (my guess is max plugins like unwrella or similar ones do the same thing) but the islands often have to be combined, so if there is a mirror of one island in a different location on the UV window, then it has to be moved and rotated to stack over the other one the same size and shape, that way the texture budgeting is much better and a clearer texture results. one i avoid usualy is the unwrap from view, which mirrors it, but stretches the middle. however any unwrapping method has limitations as well. sometimes packing the UVs doesnt always budget the texture space correctly, and even when you move things and resize them, it can get hairy. so i usually end up manipulating the islands a lot manually before exporting the UV template. sure it is time consuming, but well worth it in the long run. it just takes time and a little experimentation, like SS said. but once you get the hang of everything, it becomes second nature, and starts to be a lot of fun.

that is why i miss photoshop sometimes, the emboss tool could be used to greater effect, but now i avoid it like the plague in gimp. only in very special situations does it work correctly. with a very very clean source image/layer created from scratch. basically just black and white with no artifacts. another technique you can try is using gradient and then using a bevel filter on a selection. not exactly the same but applied to a model it will work. usually the trouble with using filters is you have to be aware of the direction of shadows, and this can be problematic depending on the orientation of the texture island. in photoshop there is more fine cotnrol over that. in gimp you almost have to make it neutral (shadow both sides of details) because there is no fine control. there is someting to be learned from viewing psd layers. if i am trying to teach someone how to use filters and techniques i can send them an xcf file (the gimp equivalent of a psd) with 20 layers or more just for one texture so they can see how i do things. so SS posting those in the blasters for modders download is a huge help for anyone trying to learn. seeing how it is done is always pretty cool. if you look at the layers there is a lot of layering going on to give it depth. SS has even more layers than i usually do. but the technique is similar. one thing i always like to recommend is a set of brushes called texturebox. which is a free download on deviantart. i believe there is both a gimp and a photoshop version as well. it will set your brushes to dynamic so they spin, but that can be turned off if you need. the reason for the dynamics is so the same stroke is not applied the same way twice. that way it looks more random. and this is importand for adding dirt, scratches, cracks, anything to age a texture if you want that. as well as giving shadows a softer edge that doesnt look stamped. sometimes you want more control over a brush, like on organic textures, sometimes a specific angle is needed, and that can be done as well. just mess around with a blank psd or xcf some time and try out the different brushes and filters. before long you can master them and make them work for you.

Probably part of the romance dialogue. But I think it was used in a mod already at some point because I remember this in the game.

i think the thing with plot holes is that unless it is huge enough to drive a 747 through, it is kind of a moot point. We live in a world where people have plot holes in their lives every day, where things dont make 100% sense, people do things out of character, and people stretch their reasoning all the time to try and justify or rationalize things. History itself has plot holes and inconsistencies. I encounter inconsistencies every day. As long as the overall story of any tale (game or not) is compelling and driving, im not concerned about most minor plot holes myself. Life itself is messy with many loose ends that not all of them will ever get tied up. So i just enjoy what i can and forget about the things i can do nothing about. Even if i could do something about it, often i ask myself to what purpose? Would it really make a difference or make things better? or is it just a wild fantasy. Is it that critical? Would it necessarily be a good thing to change things i should leave alone? Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it is no. That is largely subjective. If you feel the need to make a mod, then by all means go ahead and do so. That is how most of us started making mods in the first place. But realize that not everyone will like it, and it is more for your own enjoyment than others. If others gain something from it, then that's is icing on the cake, but not always a given.

I cant make my mind up on what I like best, but some of the mando stuff sticks out for me. I also really like the updated rotary cannon. That is awesome. I am glad you made this mod.

nmmmmmyesss, my evil mask machinations are becoming a reality and i will take over the world!!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! ahem... well i decided to do something about tetas headband, i did not like the way it looked and i kept thinking of those big bird glasses from the 80s so i decided to narrow the front part and do away with the two struts behind it... much better. does Vandar have a goggle hook? cause i want so bad to put tetas band on his head and have him do a Yoda rap in the game... it would be a worthless mod but fun...

well i have not gotten to the character model yet, but the helmet is done. just not exported yet or even ready for export. i was thinking of redoing the npc model as well to reflect the changes on the helmet. i may still do that at some point but this overhaul is my focus right now. three masks to go and it will be ready for release, but those are a bit more involved than just a replacer. its going to take some additional modding magic but that is partially done. it will solve the clipping problem for the helmet versions of the sith masks and the neural/vacuum mask (since it has both names for some reason). the red visored verpine headband is basically a retexture of the original by another modder, so i have to adjust the screwed up UVs on that model as well like i did for all the rest, however it wont be in this vaniila overhaul release, since it belongs to another mod. and one of the issues i had with it was the coloring of the holographic display texture, so i had to go a bit more on the orange side for it to be more visible. but both those models are done in blender, just not ready for export because of the UV issue with mdlops.

Here are some screens of the masks I have finished so far and appear correctly in the game. A few more tweaks are needed for some others, including coordinates on the face and clipping. But those are minor, just time consuming. I am going through them one by one and viewing them in game then adjusting them in blender again for export. Took a while to figure out my screencap key binding but I did it. So enjoy the screens. Edit: I am having a few clipping anomalies and since I am experimenting with it I tried reimporting the asciI model I exported (the one that works in game) to see if it retains the proper uvs on re-export, but they dont always, so besides clipping I have other issues with the helmet masks. So I will have to think outside the box for the helmet masks since resizing them doesnt really work, and trying to be lazy and reimport the good copies does not keep all the uvs from stretching in places. Its going to be an interesting fix but it is possible. I am working on a solution with dj, and we know how to fix it, it is just a matter of coordinating and doing it. So eventually it wont matter what kind of head the main character or the group members have (except for mission and zalbar, sorry) but all human heads will be able to wear them once that part of the mod is complete, and if they have a pony tail or something that would stick out from under the mask in real life, it will do that here as well. For mission and zaalbar, I plan on opening up a few of the goggle style mask options for him, and plan on retaining her ability to wear the goggle type masks, and possibly making alternates of some of the helmet masks for them to wear. Not sure how that will go or if it is even possible, but it is worth a try. But ultimately I want to replace the ability to wear the alternates of helmet style masks with more fitting headgear. Such as joris crown, or a krath female headdress for mission, and several wookie options for zaalbar. All of that takes some more models and coding in scripts, and some adjustments to the appearance 2da file as well as additions to it. For now the focus will be on getting the masks that fit humans and do not enclose the head to work in the game (just a few more tweaks), then getting the helmet versions of three masks to work with some modding magic, and then changing the restrictions on the goggles for zaalbar, and restricting mission from wearing the helmets. She will get some of her own stuff in the expansion to compensate for her losses. Any additonal masks will be in a follow up mod later on.

 This will be a short tutorial, and I will add pictures later for clarity, but for now I want to just give some basic tips on modeling for kotor in linux and blender. Anything else related to script editing or database editing and whatnot is beyond the scope of this tutorial so I will not get into it. Maybe at a later date. Anyway. For anyone using linux operating system there are a few tools that you need to begin. 1: Blender. I would suggest getting both the portable app and run it in wine (2.49) and the latest version from the linux repository which is at versions 2.7 or 2.8 depending on your Distro. 2: a plugin for blender that can both import and export the nwn/bioware mdl file. It is called Neverblender and can be found on Neverwintervault.Net. It is still a public beta but it does work, just not sure how well it works on any models that are more complex like skinned character models and creatures. So for now we will focus on things like placeables, items, weapons and maybe droids which are unskinned trimeshes. 3: Mdlops 0.6 -- and this is the latest version I have gotten working on linux, and it can be found on the old Lucas forums download page, however I have to add a link later. 4: Xoreos tools. His is a set of command line tools that are cross platform (meaning they work in any operating system) but they are limited since they are still in the early stages of development. Basically they are what openmw is to morrowind. It is a set of tools to try and create a new engine for bioware games and a few other games. What is useful here is the extractors. Using Xoreos I can extract all the models from kotor successfully and only need to convert them with Mdlops after that. These next two I will mention but texturing is another thread: also I am not sure how anyone in linux can get textures extracted without ktool since Xoreos wont convert them properly to tga every time. But it can be used on one texture at a time. 5: gimp: a pretty good image editing program. I learned on photoshop but once you get past the differences, there is a lot of potential in the program and once you learn how it works you can make it work for you instead of be at its mercy. 6: a series of brushes that you can find on deviant art called TextureBox. There are a lot of other brushes there too, and I would suggest being picky since your brush window can get overcrowded. But they can help out. I probably wont really get into the texturing aspects of modeling much, because that is a thread all its own but these are the tools I use as of right now. What I will mention is how to export the UV layout of a model, which can act as a sort of template when you want to see where the model borders are on the texture file. OK so lets get started First you need to use Xoreos tools to extract the model files. So take all your archives from the data folder, and the chitin.key and place them in a separate folder. Then follow the instructions for extracting on Xoreos.org and you will be able to dump the whole archive worth of models or whatever you need to access. Now the fun begins. Since linux does not recognize the .Mdl or .Mdx extension for some reason (it is unknown) the search function does not really work all that well to find the files you want. So do your best to isolate all the mdl and mdx files and cut/paste them to a new folder. You can call it maps like what ktool does just for simplicity. Now you can use Mdlops to convert the mdl files to ASCII and the mdx to text. This will double the size of the content in the maps folder and I think the size of the ASCII file is also larger. Now you have some models you can access with blender and the Neverblender plugin. Before that, if you cannot get ktool to run in linux under wine, Xoreos can also extract the tcp files in batch and then covert them to tga, but it wont convert the tcp files in batch. They have to be done one by one. So open the text file from Mdlops conversion of the mdx, and look for the name of the texture. Use that in your commands to convert the tcp to tga and you will have to dig the converted file out of the texture folder. Place all the tga files into another folder called k1 tga or something. I wont get into how to install the NeverBlender plugin, but it is pretty straight forward. Blender 2.7 and above have a nifty way to do this by installing from the user preferences and installing the plugin from a zip file, so it wont be that hard to install. You can find instructions on the blender website for your version. But do not forget to check the box to enable the plugin and then save your user preferences or you will not see it in blender. Unlike NWNmax, you do not have to open blender with the neverwinter plugin, it is just a script in the drop-downs. So go to import/neverwinter nights (.Mdl) and import the ASCII-mdl you generated with Mdlops. It must be an ASCII-mdl or it will not import. If it doesn’t import there are other workarounds, and this is why you need blender portable 2.49. But I will add those instructions later. It is too complicated a procedure to get into right now. Importing can be tricky, and sometimes things will error but still import so I am not sure how that effects the model. For instance skinned models or more complex skinned models like some of the variations of Revan can error and wont import. I think this is due to the limitations of the plugin and it will be improved over time. Once you have your model the first thing you notice is it sent you to the edit mode on an ngon you do not want to edit. It is a placeholder so ignore it and go back out to object mode. Select all empties (helper objects) and move them to another workspace layer to reduce the clutter. Also select any trimeshes that wont appear in game. These act as bones for animation, so send them to a third workspace layer. You have to select those one by one since there is no easy way to do it, I would probably prefer to select all the actual model parts and send them to another layer first. Most bodies only have three parts so that is easier than 50 trimeshes. Once you have only the mesh for characters, and the mesh and the hooks for items/weapons in one layer, then you can work easier. Select the mesh you want to alter or replace and open it in edit mode. By default it should select all the vertices, but before you get started, find the mesh drop-down, go to vertices, and then remove doubles. This will weld the mesh into one piece for easy adjustment. Also select all faces and convert them to quads. This will help for UV layout and editing as well. Now edit to your hearts content until the model is the way you want it to look. For kotor models they face away from the player, so look at the back side of it and work on the left half of the model only (as in if the model were referring to its own left hand or you were the model what would your left side be?) this will be good for symmetry later. (if your model is supposed to be symmetrical or was designed to be. If not then this wont do much good) If you only want to smooth it out a little then you can use tools like bevel on selected edges to help round out the appearance, but this will create new geometry. Don’t go way overboard because it will clutter the UV layout. Small tweaks can go a long way. Next you should select all faces and use the mesh/faces/set smooth on it to hide the sharp edges. Don’t worry it will make it look a lot smoother but we can address that later to balance it out with marking sharps. OK, now that you have the model edited it is time to focus on the UV layout. So select all the faces on the mesh you want to put a texture on. Then open the UV window, it will be blank but the UVs will be there over a blank texture space. The imported UVs may have gotten screwed up by the editing so we will address that issue in a minute but don’t worry. It is not going to hurt anything. All we are doing here is seeing how the texture appears on the model. It should be OK for the most part. To get the texture to show, you go to image, open, and then migrate to the folder you have your textures for the models in. Open the appropriate texture that goes to the model. And then go down to the menu bar and choose to display it textured in the 3d window. Now you can see where the problem areas are. If there are stretched UV faces between islands then go back to the 3d window and turn the display back to solid. Then go back into the UV window and try and separate the stretched UVs from the islands. You can do this by selecting faces and then splitting the selection from the main island. Don’t mess with the main island, just the skewed UV faces between islands. Once they are split you can drag them off to the side for now. OK so now that you have the stretched faces isolated, now it is time to find them on the 3d model. So if you have seams, then good, if not then select all faces in the UV window and mark seams from islands. This makes it really easy to find the bad UV faces. Especially in solid display. There will be heavier edges marked in red or black or whatever color your settings have them at. Those are to mark the seams between islands. This is important for the rest of the process. OK, now look around for the edges that the seams don’t connect and start to select the edges that don’t have a seam, and then mark the seams til the islands are all clearly marked as larger groups of faces on the mesh. You can find that in mesh, edges, mark seams. If you mark the wrong one then just either undo or select the seam you don’t want, and go to mesh, edges, clear seam. Now that you have the seams properly carved up, you can isolate the faces on the model that are causing the stretched UVs between islands. Once you find them you will know because they wont be a part of the normal looking islands, they will be the faces you put to the side in the UV window. OK, if you select some adjoining faces together on the model, then that is good. If they are not adjoining or a part of the good islands, then don’t select them. You only have to select faces on one half of the model if it is symmetrical, and then go to mesh, UVs, then unwrap. Only unwrap those faces that were stretched between island, nothing more. Once they are unwrapped they will take up the texture space, so now you have to resize, rotate, and move them to an appropriate spot on the texture. Once it looks good in the 3d window as texture display, then go back to the 3d window and select all faces again. Now there is a trick to the next step. Sometimes the model does not import exactly on center, so make sure it is lined up and the middle seam of vertices and edges is along the y axis. You can zoom in to make sure this is the case, but make sure you can still move the model and can see the arrows. Once it is lined up then go out to object mode, and then snap the cursor to the center this will help. Sometimes a left click will move the cursor by mistake so it is best to line it back up with center. Go back into edit mode and make sure all faces are selected again. Ignore the UV window for now. On the pivot center button choose the cursor for now. You can change the pivot back to medain point later. With all the faces selected go to meshes, then symmetrize. This will make both sides identical. However it is not without its issues, so deselect all, and then look at the center seam on the mesh, switch back to solid display if you have not already, and look for an unclean seam between the halves. You might have to zoom in really far to see the unclean center seam. If there is a gap or three vertices where there should be one, then select all the vertices on that segment where there would normally be one, and merge them all to center. This will place them at the midpoint and over the y axis and give you a clean seam between halves. Also look for vertices that should be connected to a corner but are not. I will post a pic of what I mean later. Once you are done there then go back to the UV window and see where your islands are. Display the 3d window in texture mode again and adjust the UVs till any stretching or seams are gone. This is not very hard now that you have the model in symmetry. Once that is all done and the model looks good, it is time to begin to prepare it for export. Switch it back to display solid. So staying in the UV window we will select all faces. Then we will switch back to the 3d window and clear all seams. Why? I will explain in a minute but it is important, yes you marked them all before but this is to make things simpler for the next step. You have to mark seams twice, there is no way to do it better. So clear seams, then go back to the UV window and mark seams from islands again. There, now you have fewer segments to work with. But we are not done yet. Mark a seam down the center of the model and connect any missing seams between islands til each group of faces is isolated. You can work on the left half of the model to speed it up. (as in its left not yours or if you were facing from the models point of view then that left) Once all the seams are marked on that half, then symmetrize again. Double check to make sure the seam down the middle did not get removed. Then you want to select a group of faces that correspond to the UV island it goes to. This is done simply by selecting all the faces within a seam ring. So, if they are inside their own outline, select them on the mesh, and then go to mesh, vertices, split. This will put them in their own part. Do this with each island on the left half of the mesh. To check and make sure it split properly pick a face in the center of an island on the mesh and then press control++++ until all faces on that island are selected in the 3d window. If you get to the border/outline of the seam and it stops then its good. If not then undo until you get back to before the split you just did and try again. Once all the islands are split on the left half in the 3d window, select everything on the mesh, then symmetrize again. This will transfer all the splits over to the other half as well. OK leave it that way for now. Save. Once you have it that far then display the texture again. Now you can see the faces are smooth, but some need to be sharp. So on the left half, select any edges you want sharp, like corners that are supposed to be sharp, like a sword edge, and make those sharp. Once done select all and symmetrize again. Now for the texture part of the tutorial. This is how you export the UV layout so you can make a new texture to replace the old one. Select all the UVs in the UV window. now go to UV, and scroll up to "export UV layout" and save it as a png file. You can use this on a top layer in Gimp to guide you on where the borders of islands are when you create a new texture for a modified model, or a completely new texture for a new model. The islands will be transluscent, so this is tons better than the old versions of Blender or some other modding tools for other games. Using it as a top layer is good so you can hide it if you need. I would also suggest making multiple layers of a vanilla texture to edit individually for each island and even different layers for details within an island. They can be merged prior to export to a tga file. Another tip is to semi flatten the vanilla tga so you can see the details easier, and sizing it up to at least 512x or 1024x. i dont see a need for a texture to be larger than 512, but it is a good idea to size some of them up to 1024 for details sake and some filters, and it can be sized down again later to a 512 size or 1024 depending on what the texture goes to (some walls or bodies need a larger texture, items generally do not) Ok almost ready for export. Once the texture is done and looks good on the model it is time to do final prep on the model for export. Now go to the outliner and look at the outline tree. It should have some specific traits. It should have the base node which is the aurora object, or hook, or main bone. This will be the name of the model as it appears in the game. Below that there is a hierarchy of branches in the tree, it will be as many parts of the model that there are, so if there are three objects then the main one will be a child of the base node, and the rest will be children of it or of the base node. Make sure there is only one base node and not two or more. If there is a duplicate, then unlink it or delete it. Then if the nodes are misnamed by blender, then remove the decimal numbers from the names and use another name for the node if it is identical in name to another node next to it to avoid the numbering problem. It is just best not to have numbers unless those were included in the vanilla mesh. For textures this can be tricky but that is something I cant really explain here. But usually that is not an issue. OK once the nodes look good compared to a vanilla model, then get ready for export. Go back out to the viewport windows of blender, change the UV view to 3d view and choose to view the right side of the model, then zoom in or out til it is not touching the edges of the window but the model is the only thing there, no lights or cameras. Make sure this window is switched to wire-frame display. Then select all objects in object mode that belong to that model by using border select and drag a box around the objects. This will select the model parts and the base aurora object ngon. Now go to file, export, neverwinter nights (.Mdl) and it will open a folder view and at the bottom of the window on the left sidebar there will be options. You do not have to change them for items, but I am not sure yet for skinned models or anything else. I suppose the smooth groups refers to the chunks of mesh and the apply modifiers is the equivalent of reset xform in max. You wont have to worry about clicking on the animations or walk-mesh button for most things so don’t worry about those, just leave them be. Then choose a file name, probably the same as the vanilla model or a variation if you want. Or if it s a new model you made pick your own name. I usually use the naming convention of kotor, so items start with i_name_00number. Weapons w_name_00number. Then click the button in the upper right that says "export aurora mdl" and it does it in the blink of an eye. The rest you have to do with Mdlops, and there are plenty of tutorials on that. I would just suggest having a few folders lined up in tabs to move copies from one to the next as you rename them and convert them, and to keep from overwriting anything you don’t want to mess up. That way you have a chain of progress and you can go back to the first folder and start over if you lose your place. For bulk renaming I would recommend using metamorphose2, especially in linux. This is a huge life saver if you make multiple models and want to copy them to a new folder to rename as ASCII-mdl before dropping them into your output with the original binary mdls and mdx. And it makes them easier to identify. You can also choose to name the exported blender model as ASCII-out, and the Mdlops ASCII as ASCII-in. That way you know what step that model was in and wont try and convert a vanilla model back to binary and wonder why your cool new model you spent hours on looks the same as the old one. OK, that concludes this tutorial for now. Later i will expand information in this first post to include some pictures and a second tutorial on how I force some mdl models to import with Blender 2.49b portable that will not normally import using the NeverBlender plugin. I also plan on writing a tutorial on texturing in Gimp and some of the brushes, plugins, and techniques i use to update the vanilla textures or create details i want on a model with the texture. Thanks for reading and hope this helps other Linux users that want to mod Kotor. Xander.

ok that actually worked. i had to break the faces of each island off into their own chunk of mesh and the UVs rendered in game the way they were in blender. so now that i have that worked out i know i have to do that with every model just to be sure. that makes thing a whole lot easier. so now i will not have to settle for 5 of the old masks with just new textures, now i can edit all of them and put them in game they way they were intended.

well that is another issue. i cant run mdlops 0.7 in wine for some reason. i addressed the issue with fair strides the other day but it is on hold til later. what is happening with that is when 0.7 starts in wine, it only opens a command prompt window, and then closes. running it in debug really doesnt tell me anything. so i am not sure what the issue is since wine doesnt really work 100% like windows. fair strides wants to provide a solution for that, which is something that is not windows dependent and perl based entirely, written in qt or something, but that has to be worked on so i understand if i have to wait. if i can eventually run something natively in linux, i will be real happy about it. wine has been a headache for me throughout. some programs work, some dont. usually it has to do with dotnet. wine developers are uber paranoid about dotnet exploits enabling malware in linux, so they constantly edit dotnet releases to address the issue, and as a result it is not really a fully functional version of dotnet that runs, but a wine version of it. most windows programs dependent on dotnet (whatever version number) wont run as a result of the mismatch, such as certain calls and dlls being bypassed and the program erroring out. but in this case since it is perl based there should not be an issue. but there is. wine is also the reason i can no longer use 3ds max 8 or 9, at one point i had it working and nwnmax as well, but something changed in the patch they released for wine between then and now that borked the program so i can no longer use any controls at all. all i can do is look at a model (usually a 3ds one) and nothing more. so that doesn't quite do it for me. and installing max to begin with needs a lot of heavy workarounds and regedits to even install. a headache. ... EDIT: i have also been scouring the web and i found this interesting tidbit of info, however the links are down (404) so i could not read the tutorials svosh linked to but here is a quote, and it may help. now i did some thinking about this and i am not sure exactly what that means in blender, but i will take a wild guess and say that selecing all faces of an island, and then separating them from the rest of the mesh may provide the results i seek. however i have no idea if it will or not. segmenting the mesh in exactly the same way the UV is layed out is not exactly pinpoint information. it could mean anything.