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 yesterday 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 4 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!

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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?