CarthOnasty

Back again with some UV issues (I think). And this could be a Blender/me thing. I have a couple of tris/quads that are coming out mismatched or stretched.

I double checked my files and everything looks legit in there. (Viewed with UV Editing: Display Stretch on)

Any ideas? Thanks regardless!

13 hours ago, seedhartha said:

Long story short, you need to duplicate vertices to emulate flat shading.

This is a limitation of MDL file format. It's normals are per vertex, but in Blender normals are per triangle. Here's how you can workaround that:

1. Mark edges connecting your flat triangles as sharp
2. Add Edge Split modifier to the object (ensure that Sharp Edges flag is set)

On export, this will duplicate vertices on sharp edges, creating a flat shaded look.

Awesome, thank you so much for the detailed explanation.

This is likely a setting I'm overlooking, but my models in game are much smoother than they are in Blender. I have Object set to Shade Flat on all my pieces and Export Custom Normals seems to have no affect either. Any advice is appreciated, thanks for your time.

@DarthParametricNice! Thanks for these! I'll play around and see what works.

1 minute ago, Sith Holocron said:

When the movies have to eventually be remade to show up this new Star Map, how will you sync the different star map centers in the following movie when morphing through the different planets?

 

Ask me in a year. 😜

5 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

If you want to try your hand at animation, I was thinking the other day you could maybe swap out the ball for a set of rings, kind of like a gimbal:

 

This is something I've put a lot of thought into, yeah. Something that feels a bit more spacey/futurey than a low-poly sphere. I really like that gimbal idea, I could see that working really well. I'm not up to par on animation, but could be a good way to learn.

P.S. Initial UV. These always change as I develop, but here's a start. All the tris and quads led to a bit more unwrapping that I would've preferred, but I refuse to have stretched textures. 😎

Throwing around some orb ideas. There's a scaled down version of the starburst within the center of this thing, so I wanted to somehow show that. So far proof-of-concept works, so I'll throw a few more polys on here, maybe a .txi parameter of some sort of roll with it.

5 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

I think the addition of the extra "feet" is good enough. You don't want it getting too noisy. It's not exactly the focus of attention anyway.

It's got this area on the bottom too that will have some lights or something.

Initial UV map. Likely to change as things go along, but it's a start!

12 hours ago, Sith Holocron said:

@CarthOnasty Where's the goofy part?

Me trying to remember Blender commands!

9 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

I think the central base piece could use more subdivisions. It's not running on a circa-2000 pocket calculator any more, you can budget more than a handful of tris for it.

Honestly, the most difficult part is deciding what to do. The base is very bland I agree, I've been thinking about baking some things in there as well.

goofin' off

16 minutes ago, seedhartha said:

You have loose vertices in Cylinder01. Select that object and do Mesh -> Clean Up -> Delete Loose.

Meanwhile, I will have to think how to handle it properly.

Thanks for taking a look, I'll give it a go. Thank you!

2 hours ago, seedhartha said:

Hard to say. Can you send me the .blend file so that I could investigate?

You got it.

plc_starmap.blend

Just me again, being a pain in the ass. I imported my model with Geometry, Animations, and Walkmeshes selected. I then made some edits to the model. However upon exporting (Animations, Walkmeshes, and Custom Normals selected), I'm thrown a list index out of range error. Any ideas as to what might be causing this error? Thanks for your time (and patience).

Not sure if this is canon, but this would be pretty damn cool.

because I can't let things go

12 hours ago, seedhartha said:

That should work, yes. I just checked.

Nice! Let me just say, hell of a job with this. No more breaking out to ascii and recompiling into binary. Love it!

On 6/14/2022 at 11:53 AM, LoneWanderer said:

Last time I checked, the plugin loaded with an error and didn't work on 2.79 and 2.80

Got it, thanks for info!

Another question for anyone: I'd like to do some work on a model that has animation attached to it. Is it possible to just Import Geometry, remodel as needed, and then add the animation back in later? Or is it best to keep everything together?

On 5/31/2022 at 7:03 AM, The_Drib said:

Is it possible to make a mod to make windowed mode possible for KotOR 1 on Mac? Does one already exist?

I'd be interested in this as well. I've been able to get K2 to run windowed but have yet to find anything that works for K1.

It is okay to use this with older versions of Blender? i.e., 2.79a

Yooooo, this looks amazing! My only questions thus far... how does it handle smoothgroups? I've always had edit it gmax to fix the smoothgroups and then import into Blender.

1 hour ago, Thor110 said:

? It is an armband item that you can use that warps you back to the Ebon Hawk 003EBO.mod in TSL or KotOR2

Guess I should have read that description closer

No more running back and forth in Kash?!

On 2/19/2021 at 11:50 AM, Salk said:

Hello and thanks for updating us on your progress.

My opinion: I would remove the Rakatan symbol. There are already so many symbols and there is no particular need for additional ones.

Keep up the excellent work.

Yeah, good point. And thanks!

Also more stuff:

Here's a new shot of the geometry, textured up. I've got the Rakatan symbol on the base. Too on the nose?

3 hours ago, BearLesbian said:

Where would I find the animation code ? I'm still very new to kotor modding

also, when I write and read the mdl model, which option should be checked ?

So before you import your decompiled model into Blender, you should open your .ascii file in a code editor (text editor should work as well), and look for a line that starts with newanim model_name. You'll want to copy from that line all the way down until doneanim on model_name.

After you've worked on your model and have exported from Blender, open that file in your editor and paste the previously copied code. Make sure it goes after endmodelgeom model_name and before donemodel model_name. Save and close file the compile in mdlops as normal.

As far as the settings, I haven't done any head work, so maybe just try both?

Hopefully this all makes sense! Let me know if not and I'll see what I can do.