Malkior

Good to know; so does that mean that it would just cause a Hall of Mirrors effect rather than just crashing when it tries to load the model in? Wow, I never would have guessed that even the user cameras have their own customizations for near and far planes. I was having a similar problem with zooming when I was editing the Telos area model earlier, so this will be quite helpful in future endeavors. Um.. yeah I have grid snapping enabled AND I disabled the active grid, so that probably explains why it snapped to the only grid it could find at the GMax center. 😐 Thank you for these quick answers, it seems so simple but when you're in the thick of it, it's difficult to figure out. Now that I have the piece detached and copied, how do I get it into the game? Alternatively, should I focus on texturing it before that point?

Alright. I rebuilt the polygons by using what remained of the inside edge of the collar, and hopefully it will render properly now. Also, you aren't wrong about GMax hating backfaces. Even trying to build them from the top edge caused it to freak out and led to all kinds of visual anomalies (like weird geometry showing up and even the polygons disappearing when I looked at it close up) It's like backfaces are black holes as far as it's concerned.. I also noticed that when I manually create polygons, the new vertices I have to create start on the 0 Y axis in the Gmax world (Which so happens to be way outside of where the model is). This is normal behavior, right? Anyway, I got the smoothing groups set up and the polygons hopefully sorted. The next step is texturing, right?

Sorry, somehow I never got a notification of your reply. In any case, Here's my second attempt with hopefully better and more cleaned up geometry. Now, do I set the smoothing groups to 1 for all of my new polygons? Also, I took the liberty of deleting the inner neck seam polygons since generally you can't see the inside of the body model. Am I looking at trouble down the line for doing so?

After a lot of research, I finally found my way around to at least doing something in the way of modeling. This is literally my first proper attempt at modeling, so I imagine it is fraught with inconsistencies. However, I am more interested in the lower part. As you can probably see, the polygons that originally connected the neck to the torso are gone as a direct result of deleting the vertices that connected the two parts. Do I have to redraw them before I more forward? The method I used was to cut a square portion out of the back and then extrude that around to complete the collar. Is this a viable method, or should I try again with a better technique?

.... Right... Okay, I have the mesh separated and cloned. Do I weld the new one to the old mesh, or is there something else needed? Am I adding the geometry before I weld it, or am I welding it at all?

Okay. So far, I can't find an "Invert" modifier. You said to delete the vertices from the original then to invert the duplicate before deleting everything except the vertices deleted in the original, right? Am I flipping the normals, or is there some way to invert all of the vertices?

Dumb question, but I Clone an Instance rather than a Copy, right?

After first booting it up and attempting export, I get this Error Message: I also keep getting a message that the mesh "Depends on the Typology" of the skin modifier which is higher on the stack. Do I just ignore this and proceed? How do I duplicate the mesh? Is there a modifier, menu item, or shortcut key to do this? In duplicating the mesh, am I just duplicating the entire thing or is this for just the torso section?

Gonna take a few attempts to figure that out, but I have a few days this weekend to do it. -Will post updated questions as they arise-...

Alrighty. Then I guess for the trees, it seems more viable to just edit the geometry already present in the scene. The hard part is going to be rewrapping the textures so that I can have a unique texture for the bushes and branches (since currently they both use the same texture) Heck, most of the geometry is blurred terribly because of how bad the UVW maps are; is there a tutorial somewhere on how to assign or remap textures specifically in GMax? Regarding the clothing, my ultimate goal is to introduce actual collars to the various armor and clothing meshes instead of the painted on ones in Vanilla. Thankfully the area around the neck doesn't have to deform much, as far as I know.

Finally finished the mesh fixes. 231tela.zip I imagine my polygons are kind of horrible in places, but as far as I've tested, you no longer float three feet above the ground. Thank you for the primer in using Gmax; I've found a few useful tutorials, and even so it is quite stripped down so even something as simple as the Bridge function has to be done manually. Still it's a fine alternative to paying $700, so I'll take what I can get. Now, I'm looking at improving the trees if I can, but I need a few more steps laid out for me. There are a few tree models out there, but will they work with the game models and is there a process required to add them to the geometry with minimal issues? Lastly, I want to do some armor editing on the side. Do the armor models need specific animations, or are they basically static objects and don't have their own animations? Again, thank you for the massive help you've provided in my first foray into 3d modelling; If there is a want, I can draft each of my many hard-earned lessons into a lengthy tutorial.

Well... turns out I wasn't looking at the ticker on the bottom right letting me know that it was actually exporting the entire time. I'm so trained by popup boxes that it didn't even occur to me. Also, the green snooper icon was exactly where you said it'd be in the hidden icon tab. So, back on track I guess.. (I hope my pratfalls benefit someone trying this for the first time, because I'm sure these constant panic moments are no doubt exhausting. Thank you for helping out with this process as I hit each speedbump one after the other..)

I have Kotormax.exe in my Gmax root and use a shortcut to it on my desktop to start the program, but I don't see any green icons when I'm running it. I'm running it from Direct3D on Windows 10, if that has anything to do with it.

I am currently in the process of proverbially pulling my hair out in trying to figure the GMax interface. Every time I hit Export in the Kotormax bar, it acts like nothing happens and any time I hit "Set" it says "No Odyssey mesh selected". I tried to set the "Browse" parameter to the folder I want the export to go to, but nothing in GMax can export GMax files to MDLs. Should I just keep the program running at all times since Gmax files are less than useless if I hope to keep using the MDL? Is there a way to save files as anything but GMax's through the Kotormax interface? More importantly, did I make a huge mistake by ever saving my files as GMax's?