KotOR II Model editing in Blender

[Letstrit]

Hey there y'all!

Been playing KotOR since it's release, great games that don't get old. 

Trying to get into modding TSL. Have little to no modelling experience, thus not going to attempt anything complex yet, but a sinple model adjustment seems to be over my head right now. 

I'm resmeshing and retexturing an existing body model in Blender using Kotor tool, it goes pretty well until I get to texturing. I just can't get new UV map to work when exporting .mdl and .mdx. It seems that my custom UV unwrap overwrites any existing UV map, but does not save the new one. The model in game is transparent, like non-existent, just the head floating.

What am I doing wrong? How do I get the new UV map ant texture to work? 

Edited Wednesday at 04:46 PM by Letstrit

[DarthParametric]

7 hours ago, Letstrit said:

The model in game is transparent, like non-existent, just the head floating.

This is an issue with the model itself, not the UVs. Attach your exported MDL/MDX and source blend file.

[Letstrit]

Here.

First two pics show how the original UV on modified mesh behaves in Blender and in the game. Don't mind the colors - they are for demonstration purposes only. 

Secpnd two - how the colors are supposed to display on the model with custom UV unwrapping. Granted, I might've botched the whole unwrapping business, but it is the same with smart uv unwrap, so I doubt it is a skill issue. 

I only edited the body - torso and legs - so the arms show in bots scenarios. 

 

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pfbam NEW UV.mdl pfbam NEW UV.mdx pfbam NEW UV.blend

Edited Thursday at 01:39 PM by Letstrit

[DarthParametric]

There's something very weird going on. There is no UV data stored in the traditional manner if you load it into Max, but if you it into Blender it appears to show island boundaries that conform to the body shape. Doesn't actually show any UVs though, although I have no idea how to use Blender's UV editor. Whatever you did, you apparently didn't store the UVs in channel 0. Not sure how that would make the mesh invisible though.

[WolfsBane]

Hi there, Letstrit. I've looked at the files and after some tinkering, fix is to rename the new custom UV name from "UVMap.001" to the default "UVMap". It seems that the Blender add-on expects for a UV to be named  the default way "UVMap". It uses this specific one when exporting. And if no UV is named that way, it skips and the mesh disappears. Hope this helps

Edited 23 hours ago by WolfsBane
Added more context and information

[Letstrit]

You know what?

That's exactly what did the trick! It had to be this specific little hurdle, had it?

Thank you, WolfsBane. And DarthParametric. You guys really helped!

Spoiler

 

By the way, can you tell me why each arm is a separate mesh? Torso and legs are combined into one, will it break the model if I join the arms with torso for easeir modelling? Or it is better to separate them again after I've finished reshaping?

[WolfsBane]

5 hours ago, Letstrit said:

You know what?

That's exactly what did the trick! It had to be this specific little hurdle, had it?

Thank you, WolfsBane. And DarthParametric. You guys really helped!

I used your blend file as a test case for this, i merged every body part component, and the result is quite interesting visually:

 

Spoiler

 

  This is a question that DarthParametric could probably answer more correctly, but my guess is that there is a hard limit on the number of Trimesh Bones that can influence one mesh object. As a result the mesh needs to be split into many pieces, each with a smaller number of bone influences. I've counted the number of vert groups on each mesh, 16 bone influences for each bodypart.  You can definitely join them and model to your heart's content, but when you export it is recommended to split the mesh, at least the arms.

A quick tip: If you decide to join the each mesh when modelling, the vertex groups will also pile together. I believe it is required for each mesh to have only the vertex groups (bone weights) that correspond to the Trimesh Bones. If any other extra non-deforming vertex group exists, a huge error warning will occur. You can use an add-on called EasyWeights to clear out the extra unused vertexgroups on a mesh. It's made by the guy responsible for the animation rigs at the BlenderStudio, 
 

Spoiler

 

Oh and another semi-related tip:. When working with vertex groups, they must be 100% percent Normalized, otherwise other visual bugs will occur. 

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Edit: i did a little search and i found this topic, about the bone limit on a mesh, with a bit of useful info.

Edited 15 hours ago by WolfsBane
Made the image attachements as spoilers as to not fill the page

[DarthParametric]

3 hours ago, WolfsBane said:

there is a hard limit on the number of Trimesh Bones that can influence one mesh object

Yes. The model format only "officially" supports 16 bones per mesh, but actually has provision for 17. Hence why vanilla body models are split.