CarthOnasty

I guess I hadn't really noticed that. I think what I'll do is a straight unedited export/import to see if Blender is indeed stripping that info out. That'd be a damn shame if it was. It could be possible, sure. I'd have to see what it looks like in-game. We were just talking about this on Discord last night and the difficulty of getting cm_baremetal to not look like "it was coated in Vaseline". 😝 Thanks for the support as always. 🤜🤛

Testing out the new UVs. They seem to be lining up just fine. 😀

///// 01. Two-Point-Oh ///// First off, thanks to everyone who’s downloaded and offered support through this process. I appreciate all of your comments, critiques and suggestions. Through the creative process, the gears started turning for future plans. Here’s loosely what I’m planning thus far: ///// 02. Planned Improvements ///// Remap the UVs. A lot of the patterns repeat, e.g. details on arms are also on feet, or also on base, etc. I know I wanted to remedy those first and foremost. I wanted the arms to have their own textures, the feet their own, etc. etc. etc. Progressive: Create a UV for each arm and leg, which would increase the work significantly because then we go from 2 pieces to 6. Overkill? Planet rotations. When the map opens and you see the location of each planet, they slowly (and very choppily(?) rotate. I’d really like to smooth that out a bit, as it’s just a hacked together animation. I think it has 9 frames right now? At a minimum, I’d go up to… 18 frames? Progressive: Each planet has its own custom shape and visual identifier. Right now, it’s random Aurebesh numbers (which technically didn’t exist as it does now, same with planet names), but we’ll see. Does it even need those I guess? Maybe it’s actually the type of planet referenced by the terminal, i.e. barren, arboreal, etc. More “Builder-esque”. Until ebmar pointed this out (and it should have seemed so obvious), this is a Rakata structure. I got the Aurebesh (see comment above) in there, but what else can I do to make this more “Builder”? I started looking around at a lot of source photos and ran around the Unknown World location a bit. I think I can change the rock? metal? country? to be a bit more… just “of that world”. Perhaps I made it too sleek in 1.0. While I have the texture itself pretty roughed it, it’d also make sense that some parts got chipped/rotted off here and there. Progressive: ebmar and I have been chatting about having a new sound for the opening of the maps. Dodecahedron. I really hate that thing. I want to make it a sphere or I dunno, just something different. I was so difficult to figure out how to reskin it before. There would be so much more I could do with a different shape. At the very least it’s been given a new UV map. Progressive: Play around with some transparency ideas. ///// 03. Planet Customizations ///// Let’s just go ahead and mark this whole section as “Progressive”. The idea would be to create a star map for every location, customized to that planet. The thing with that is there would need to be at least 4 more placeables created or they’d have to be built into the room itself. Hard to say what the route would be at this point, I mean, there are a limited number of placeables in the game. Anyway, the custom ideas: Dantooine This would just be the base model. Similar to what it is now, though with a violet glow. Tatooine Yellow glow. Sand-blown, sand in crevices and piled around base. Maybe throw some krayt scales in there? Like the dude was using it as a scratching post. Kashyyyk Green glow. This thing has been in a jungle for what, 10k years? Let’s thrown some moss, vines, etc. on there. It’d only make sense that the jungle would start taking it back. Moisture stains. Rust? I’m iffy on that one. Manaan Blue glow. Heavy algae growth. Coral, barnacles growing on it? Korriban Red glow. (durrr) I’m a little stuck on this one because it’s unexposed to the elements basically. I was thinking along the lines of blood splatters and saber burns. Thinking maybe someone fought in that room at some point. ///// 04. Recent Dev ///// The model has a completely new UV map. Every part has its own map to avoid pattern repetition. While I don’t know if I’ll recreate all 3 arms and all 3 legs still remains to be seen. Lots of reading about creating placeables and modding rooms. ///// 05. Future Dev ///// I really don’t care for the end animation of when you open the final star map. It seems so lackluster and very anticlimactic to me. I envision once the final map opens and the coordinates triangulate, you now have a large hud of the starforge. As of now there are just blue streaks and dinky animations (no offense Bioware). All of this really gets into some hardcore modeling and animation and that’s way, way, WAY over my head. I’m using Blender too, and well, it doesn’t like KotOR animations that much. ///// 06. Final ///// So that’s what’s going on at this point. Thanks again to everyone who’s download the mod, given their opinions and suggestions and more. This has been a fun project and I’m hoping it will continue to be so! If there’s anything you’d like to add to the above list or have anything else you’d like to share, by all means. Feel free to follow this post for updated now and then. Cheers, -CO

You are correct, I was pointing out the middle portion. And yeah, I did the copy/paste thing it totally works now! Thanks soooo much for this advice. And thanks for the MDLOps tip as well! You're awesome, thanks for this.

First off, here's what I'm looking at. On your right, the stock star map and on your left, what I see when I add my modded files. Here's my process: Use KotOR Tools to grab plc_starmap.mdl and plc_starmap.mdx. Select plc_starmap.mdl in MDLOps 1.0.0, Extract Animations and Compute smoothgroup numbers is checked. Click Read and write model. It does its thing. Import plc_starmap-ascii.mdl in Blender, via KotORBlender. UV map some flarksnorzen, arms, legs, etc. Export edited file as plc_starmap_v2.mdl. Load plc_starmap_v2.mdl into MDLOps and hit Read and write model. I know have two new files: plc_starmap_v2-k1-bin.mdl and plc_starmap_v2-k1-bin.mdx. I place those in my Override folder and rename them to plc_starmap.mdl and plc_starmap.mdx. Open KotOR, open save just prior to entering room. Enter room, watch what happens. Animations all seem to be working fine, it's just that nearly ALL of the textures are not loading. Say "harrumph". Ask DS for help.

Reaching out to anyone following or checking this mod out, I'm starting to put together some ideas for a second version. If there are any suggestions you would like to have seen, or would like to see, please let me know. I appreciate any and all feedback!

Would you recommend using GMax over Blender?

Cool, I'll double-check when I get home. Thanks!

There's the checkbox to do so, and I honestly don't remember if I checked it or not. Should I have? And then when I export to .mdl do I need to manually rename that to an ascii?

e.g. The sphere in the middle of the starmap, it rises up when it opens, yada. That no longer appears in game, same with any of the other starmap animations and textures. Anything directly related to what I worked on works just fine. On MDLOps 1.0.0.

So after some trial and error, I was able to successfully remap the object, run in through mdlops and have it successfully working in-game. (Which was really cool to see.) The only issue I have now, is that some of the original (untouched) objects and their relative textures are no longer showing in-game. i.e. Working on the starmap placeable, I was able to remap the base and have that show in game. Now nothing else shows though. Even though the base was the only map/texture I touched. Any ideas?

Here's another thing.

Doing some 2.0 work today.

I'm looking for assistance in creating a new UV Map for a project I'm working on. I've got all the tools needed, ( KotorTools, mdlops, Blender, and kotorblender) but I can't seem to get it working as intended. I think maybe I'm just not understanding the concepts behind creating new seams and cuts on the model. What I'd essentially like to do is take a placeable in-game, strip it of it's current UV Map and associated .tga, and then create a whole new mapped out wrap and .tga. If you'd be willing to help out with this, by all means let me know. In the meantime I'll keep playing around in Blender. Thanks for your time. -CO

I was looking for a centralized list of all of the parameters for .txis and what they do, but I wasn't able to locate anything. Here's what I've discovered so far, looking through various KOTOR files. blending Various blending options using the alpha channels of the .tga. (Think Photoshop blending options.) blending additive Used for translucency. Equivalent to Add or Linear Dodge, the color is added to whatever is underneath. blending punchthrough Used for transparency. e.g. grass, hair, etc. bumpmapscaling Increases the intensity of the bump map, i.e. increases the height of the bump map. bumpmapscaling 1 bumpmaptexture Defines the bump map for the texture. bumpmaptexture C_Hutt01b bumpyshinytexture Used with a bump map on a texture that uses an environment map. e.g. If you're using cm_baremetal on a metal texture, you'll want to use bumpshinytexture instead of envmap. bumpyshinytexture C_Hutt01b cube Defines that the associated texture is a cubemap. cube 1 decal Renders the texture on top of anything it's flush with. Black areas of texture will be translucent. decal 1 defaultheight The height of 1 frame for an animation. defaultheight 128 defaultwidth The width of 1 frame for an animation. defaultwidth 128 envmaptexture Defines the environment map for the texture. envmaptexture CM_Bright fps The speed at which frames will cycle when animated. fps 24 isbumpmap Defines the texture is a bump map. isbumpmap 1 mipmap Multiple copies of the same texture in different sizes to be rendered based on distance from PC. With this command, you can force the game to always show the highest mip. mipmap 1 numx The number of horizontal frames for an animation. numx 4 numy The number of vertical frames for an animation. numy 4 proceduretype Followed by cycle, initiates the cycling of frames for animations. proceduretype cycle Here's a more specific example for how an animation would work: proceduretype cycle defaultwidth 256 defaultheight 256 numx 3 numy 2 fps 12 By all means let me know if anything is inaccurate or if you can provide any more information. Thanks!