MDLOps

[JCarter426 1,220]

So, your second issue, regarding connected geometry and different UVW vertices along island breaks. That is a limitation of the MDL/MDX format and cannot be worked around (well, unless MDLOps were to automatically split edges that need to be split, which is technically possible). You have to double your vertices along every edge of UVW islands. It is because vertices and UV vertices are stored together in single MDX rows, so you can't have a UV without a geometry vertex, and you can't have multiple UVs for a single geometry vertex. You can tell whether you are going to have this problem by opening your ASCII model in a text editor, going to the node you modified (torso), and seeing if the number of verts matches the number of tverts. If it does not, your model will have some kind of problem, maybe subtle, maybe not.

 

I see. I suspected that might be the case. So the only way to have separate UVW maps is to have separate meshes or elements. I can live with that. But then that does leave the matter of the smoothing. For that matter I can only hope that one of you enables smoothing group in a future update.

 

The way I have been working lately is to weld all the vertices, and then towards the end, I go around each UV island edge using 'edge split' to double the vertices as required. That is a blender command though, so you'd need to find/do the 3ds equivalent.

 

I believe I tried this already, but I could go back and try again. I may have been doing it wrong before.

 

But it sounds like it wouldn't resolve the smoothing issue anyway, since they would still be separate elements. For un-mirroring, in the past I've split it into two different meshes and it had a visible seam in the middle. Seems like the result would be the same for that. And in the case of PFBAM it has all the duplicate vertices already, but still no smoothing.

 

EDIT: Yeah, I tried welding the vertices and then used the detach as element function. Still no smoothing. It basically set the model back to the way it was before.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

Is vertex smoothing not working in mdlops7? That was like the main thing it was supposed to implement

[DarthParametric 3,795]

There are posts about the issue in 0.7a2 back at the end of January 2016, so news of it isn't new.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

There are posts about the issue in 0.7a2 back at the end of January 2016, so news of it isn't new.

I vaguely remember that... seemed to work fine for things I've been using it for so idk

 

I also had a program that smoothed all of the normals in the .mdx file bur I trashed it awhile ago... guess I should have held onto it.

[JCarter426 1,220]

What does work works great. Smoothing on individual mesh elements is fine. No more ugly seams on arms and legs and such. But it won't do smoothing between different meshes or mesh elements - essentially, across seams in the UVW map.

 

It's only a problem depending on what model you're working on. Many of the armors are fine. Where their meshes meet, there isn't supposed to be smoothing, because there's armor or whatever in between the joints. The underwear models are particularly problematic, though, because they're meant to be smooth all over.

 

The issue also crops up on models that have... the nice word would be questionable, questionable UVW mapping. The Jal Shey armor and the Twin Sun models, for example, have faces on the UVW map that are isolated for seemingly no reason, on the pants. The original models get away with it thanks to the smoothing, but MDLOps loses that.

[VarsityPuppet 1,085]

What does work works great. Smoothing on individual mesh elements is fine. No more ugly seams on arms and legs and such. But it won't do smoothing between different meshes or mesh elements - essentially, across seams in the UVW map.

 

It's only a problem depending on what model you're working on. Many of the armors are fine. Where their meshes meet, there isn't supposed to be smoothing, because there's armor or whatever in between the joints. The underwear models are particularly problematic, though, because they're meant to be smooth all over.

 

The issue also crops up on models that have... the nice word would be questionable, questionable UVW mapping. The Jal Shey armor and the Twin Sun models, for example, have faces on the UVW map that are isolated for seemingly no reason, on the pants. The original models get away with it thanks to the smoothing, but MDLOps loses that.

 

It should at the very least have been smoothing between elements that are in the same mesh.

 

Ah well, as long as a fix is in the works

[DarthParametric 3,795]

In the meantime, one solution is a remap to try and hide the seams as much as possible, such as I have suggested previously:

 

 

Assuming of course you are willing to deal with the destruction of the original skin weights that accompanies it.

[JCarter426 1,220]

Yeah, but unfortunately I'm not. I have weighted stuff from scratch before, and it was not fun. There are some possible shortcuts with 3ds' modifiers but I've never managed to consistently get them to work with the game, so I try to avoid losing that data. As far as remapping it... well, technically I know how, but I don't think I have the patience or skills to do it well. It certainly wouldn't look as nice as the above images.

 

In general if I could do that sort of thing I'd be making new models for these projects instead of hacking up the game models.

 

But regarding my specific problems, I did manage to work around most of it. Detaching faces to a new element allowed for the un-mirroring, and the smoothing didn't even look too bad. And for the other project, I'm looking into using other models for the legs.

[DarthParametric 3,795]

Nice to see that MDLOps has finally emerged as a functioning, well-adjusted member of society. Only took a decade and a half, but better late than never. Props to ndix UR for getting it to the big 1.0.0.

[CarthOnasty 214]

I'm not having any issues, I'm just more curious as to what the following output means:

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