vurt

ah right you said UV, no, the lightmap i tried giving another name. working on a script now, lets see how it works out.

Tried that, if you just give it a name then it wont do the baking, it must have a name that already exists and you must click lightmapped. if you just give it a name you wont get any lightmap texture for that mesh, at least in my experience, i've looked in the image editor afterwards and its not listed. I've hade some luck using the same name, but the lightmap texture looks all wrong to me, with just a tiny strip in the middle, and the rest is just a pure black. I use Blender 4.2, maybe i should switch to an earlier version in case this is just completely bugged for 4.2

yes i know they're textures, but i'm curious how it applies over the level mesh, especially when several are in use. yes, without turning on lightmapped it wont do anything if you click bake (auto). with duplicating UV, you mean just using the same name as some default UV lightmap? i do wonder if "shadow" is good to use or not too.. I'll give it some more shots though

do you know how to give new meshes a lightmap? or how to get a lightmap that isn't just the name of the map, which seems to be the default. I think the hardest thing for me to understand how different lightmaps would even work for a scene, they overlap in layers? I'm totally new to lightmaps, never used it before. all the tedious things can easily be made into a .py script with chatgpt or any other AI, it will give you one in seconds. Like making sure the secondary UV is selected for all meshes, or anything else you need to do manually. As long as you can explain the whole process in great detail (show it screenshots too), it could make a 1-click solution for doing UV-maps, apart from lighting. I tried and it did read your guide, and looked at the source code, but so far no luck with a 1-click solution, parts of it works really well though, making sure everything is set up correctly. i think where it fails is the files themselves because i can not give it detailed information about how that part even works.

some old games faked shadows with vertex painting, but yeah, not the same thing as lightmaps.

Those are great looking, what an improvement Yeah i dunno, seems too difficult, but i am not very technical, its why i prefer to do textures. Do you know if the engine supports vertex painting? i can always fake lightning via that instead, way easier and very fast to do. Not the same results, but its something. Actually, looking at the original maps, i first thought they had just painted dark blobs under the trees.

There's a guide here by J, but i'm not having much luck with doing them. i've selected all objects, and i run the auto bake from KOTOR. It creates a single lightmap, i save it, i unwrap it and i end up with a terrible looking ground with tons of black triangles. Not sure the lightmap even looks correct, its just a rather thin horizontal strip on a black texture, 80% is wasted on the pure black. I was thinking i could give these my own file names in the Lightmap slot (under Main Texture), but that doesn't work. It will only create 233telEA_lm0.tga, so i guess that's the name to go for in all lightmap slots for the objects? I am thinking i could skip it completely (adding tons of new trees and various plants to some maps) and while its still an improvement, even without the lightmaps, it would be interesting to see how it looks with proper lightmapping. Overall it seems like an extremely cumbersome thing to do, to even get it to unwrap is very, very inconsistent, often i can not make it mark the UV so that i can unwrap it (yes, all objects selected).

i'll add some more stuff, working on 1 click walkmesh solution too (maybe this is already super easy, i have not looked into collision), and probably some other stuff.

I made this helper tool (using AI coding). Works pretty well and solves a lot of issues that i had with the exporter. The "Assign Automatic Node number" is especially helpful if you are just pasting hundreds of trees and plants like i'm doing, setting it manually every time is very time consuming. I can share it and give a tutorial later, but i will work on it a little more first. If you have suggestions for the tool i can certainly try adding them, i just need a good explanation of it and the AI can add it.

Very helpful, Thank you!

Managed to fix it, well, at least this one (previous Morrowind mesh) did eventually export. I was thinking i could add a lot more variety and detail to at least some maps with more trees, bushes, maybe various other clutter. I am not entirely sure these will have collision, but i think not (no idea where collision is set, i will have to research), so flora will be the most optimal thing to add, bushes or plants that you can just walk through and isnt colliding with enemies etc, so pretty much how it works in modern games. Trees would either need collision or i would only place them where they are not in the way of enemies or the player, like on top of hills and cliffs etc. Not sure any of the bigger mods edit these mdl world files (e.g 233telea.mdl)? Hopefully not.

That is good to know! My meshes will basically just be trunk and leaves. i do have a working .mdl for this that we try to work from, looking at why this mesh can be exported successfully and others can not. This working .mdl i made from an existing mdl (a tree in one of the world .mdl files), so its just an edit.

A crapshoot for sure, but any expert here when it comes to .mdl export? its very complex and difficult since there really are no guides that i have found, but i do know some things from googling, making chatGPT sweep the internet and summarize and just testing. Just editing a current working .mdl and exporting it is super easy and always works, but if you try to export e.g a imported model of another format (e.g a morrowind .nif or whatever) or probably if you create a new mesh in blender, then things gets very complex and you will end up with nothing exported because some requirement wasn't met (yet this is never reported, so impossible to know where it failed). Here is a summary that me and chatgpt pretty much has come up with after many, many hours. (script fix = i am trying to make a script that will just auto fix these issues). But this is not nearly enough to make an export work. What else is needed for a proper export is unknown to me. It would be cool to create a script that fixes all these things automatically... So if someone has any insight apart from below (some stuff there can absolutely be wrong btw, dont trust it lol), please let me know. 1. Root node setup KOTOR expects one root node with the same name as the exported model (e.g., Tree01 → root object Tree01). All geometry, emitters, lights, etc. must be parented under this root. Blender’s scene often has multiple roots or collections — the script creates a single proper root and re-parents everything under it. ✅ Script fix: Creates a root node (if missing) and re-parents all meshes to it. 2. Trimesh (geometry) hierarchy Every visible mesh in KOTOR MDL must be a Trimesh node, not a generic object. Parent-child order matters: root → trimesh → (possibly more trimeshes) Meshes cannot be children of empty collections, lights, or non-trimesh objects. ✅ Script fix: Finds all visible mesh objects and ensures they’re parented correctly to the root (or another trimesh if hierarchical). 3. Transformation and coordinate resets KOTOR uses Y-up, Blender is Z-up. Negative scale or unapplied transforms cause flipped normals or inverted export. MDL exporter needs applied transforms and consistent orientation. ✅ Script fix: Applies scale/rotation transforms so geometry exports cleanly. 4. Material & texture linking KOTOR MDL doesn’t read Blender’s Principled BSDF setup. It expects a simple diffuse texture link — typically .tga or .tpc. Export fails or uses wrong texture if: Multiple nodes are connected, Material uses unsupported shaders, Texture isn’t named properly. ✅ Script fix: Rebuilds simple material slot linking so the exporter recognizes texture assignments (Diffuse → TGA/TPC filename). 5. Naming compliance No spaces or illegal characters in node names. Exporter crashes or renames objects automatically otherwise. ✅ Script fix: Sanitizes names to comply with MDL naming conventions. 6. Lightmap / secondary UV disabling KOTOR MDL doesn’t use Blender’s secondary UV maps or lightmap channels. Keeping them can confuse the exporter or result in invalid tangents. ✅ Script fix: Strips or ignores unused UV sets to prevent broken exports. 7. Empty / collection cleanup Unused empties or nested collections confuse the hierarchy parser. Each geometry must have a direct lineage to the root, not via hidden empties. ✅ Script fix: Flattens collections, removes orphan empties, and preserves a clean, linear hierarchy. 8. Consistent object origin (pivot) MDL pivot points define animation centers and attachment positions. If the Blender origin is offset (common after import), animations or rotations look wrong. ✅ Script fix: Re-centers or aligns origins as per parent hierarchy. 9. Quaternion-based rotations KotOR’s .MDL format uses quaternion-based rotations internally (not Euler). If a Blender object’s transform stack or animation data includes: non-applied rotation, Euler keyframes, or mismatched rotation modes, the KotOR exporter (specifically io_scene_kotor) often silently fails or exports a file missing key node data — i.e. the .MDL will be 0 bytes or crash the game. 10. Export sanity checks Before letting you export, the script verifies: There is exactly one root. All meshes are children of valid MDL nodes. There are no unlinked materials or images. Scene hierarchy is valid for MDL tree structure.

without reshade

Added some trees to this area, just to see how much of a difference it makes and if it would affect FPS (it didn't, 0 difference in FPS even after adding around 100 trees). I think the game looks incredibly dull with these super bare areas with nothing going on in them. I might be able to animate them too, i have added animated trees to Morrowind. Though this could make the game a bit inconsistent unless i animate all trees in all areas, and that is.. unlikely. video: KotOR TSL with new trees