The Workshed

[Malkior 476]

Embedding should work with any valid browser-renderable image format, via the IMG tag. Imgur should offer you embedding links via the Get Share Links option (in the mouseover menu).

While doing some extensive tests with Imgur in transferring my screenshots from Photobucket, I can verify that imbedding Imgur links is as simple as copying and pasting the image.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

So this is my current nightmare. The mesh is skinned but there's some sort of unseen influence in the scene causing weird distortion right off the bat. I can't even do the skinning in Maya because of the FBX data loss. :|

So, this may be the longest step for me. Don't laugh, haha.

I'm still going through the linked tutorials, but I definitely have a slow learning curve. Especially when what I want to do should take about 10 minutes but everyone takes 45 minutes to explain. Haha.

Also, I have no idea how materials work. So I'm wondering if they need to be baked to the mesh before using MDLops? And how do spec maps in the game? Is black or white the spec value?

[DarthParametric 3,782]

A simple diffuse is pretty much your lot in most cases. The game doesn't support specularity in the typical sense. It uses environment maps (i.e. cube maps) to fake a combined specularity/reflection. In practice it is mostly used for shiny metals because of how over the top it is (getting a nice flat specular highlight is pretty much impossible). You use the alpha channel as a mask for this, then specify the envmap via a text file sharing the texture name with the TXI extension (vanilla textures include this info internally). As you may suspect, this is an either/or proposition if you want to use alpha transparency.

 

As for your skinning woes, it's hard to say from looking at pictures beyond a generic "weight issue". If you want to post or PM me your model I can take a look.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6GSFmpZMBVRUTBzMjJMc1hGemM

Here's a drive download of the 3Ds Max file.

So the alpha channel would be used for that in the TGA file?
I'll do that once the texture is totally finished. I'd like some more input from anyone interested before I commit to it.



The leg decal has since been removed. But this is the clearest view of default lighting.

^The texture maps for anyone looking to add some input.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

You have weights assigned to non-bone objects, like the AuroraBase (P_VisasBB), the ignore ngon, and all the various dummies/hooks. You need to clear all those out. That's causing most of your distortion. But you also have incorrect bone weights, like fingers weighted to the pelvis.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

Thanks so much for pointing that out. I'll do my best to fix it. As is, I'm just struggling to select the right bones even from the hierarchy. Haha 
But I'll get that sorted out right away and post some progress shots.

In Maya, typically when you skin, it's weighted to nearest neighbor, and you're able to group your mesh and select your root joints in two clicks, and you're ready to go.
Max seems to be a slightly different process that's a little more involved.

Furthermore, (this is just a side question) but does anyone know where the tga files are kept for the various clothes in game? While I'm not working on this, I'd like to see about doing some touchups if at all possible.
Or are they grouped with the individual meshes somewhere?

[DarthParametric 3,782]

The highest res textures are stored in an ERF archive located at TexturePacks\swpc_tex_tpa.erf but they aren't TGA, they are TPC, Bioware's own format. You'll need to install KOTOR Tool anyway as a prerequisite for just about any KOTOR modding, and that will let you browse and extract the textures.

 

Regarding bones, for the most part what you are looking for is anything with a "_g" suffix, for example rthigh_g, lforearm_g, etc. Although that's not a universal rule, for example breastbone. Anything with "_geo" is actually a rendered mesh, not a bone. Anything that is a dummy object you can ignore, like the AuroraBase that everything is a child of, anything with "hook", like DeflectHook or HeadHook, etc.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

So I will admit that my progress has been slow. I did manage to bind the skin only to the _g suffix bones.
Now the distortion is much better. There still seems to be something pulling the fingers on the stage-right hand. Any idea on how to view influences in window?

Honestly once I've figured this out once, I can do it as many times as I need to for future mods so I'm enjoying the learning experience.

I may turn my sights to Mandalore and G0-T0 next. Though I'm open to suggestions.

#soclose
#nevergonnagiveyouup

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

 

So this is where I left off last night. Got all the bones working properly and the deformation is better.

But this is where I am now, envelopes only take me so far. I need certain separate pieces to contain only one influence. (i.e. the claws and collar pieces).

It's actually not as bad as I make it sound, but I do have a strong learning curve to new 3D stuff.

Edit: fixed it: To all wayfaring googlers, after selecting the mesh, edit the capsules to fit about right and then under weight properties turn the Abs. Effect up to 1.0

Here's a peak at the now single weighted claws:

Update 2: This is how I feel now. Haha
So as you can see the main deformation zones are the limbs and the pelvis. Currently, I'm figuring out how to change the influences. The feet and claws look fine for the most part.

But once I got that then I can get the textures linked and we'll be good to go.


 

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

Managed to manually weight vert by vert. Which wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. (Thank goodness for low poly meshes.)
The deformation is pretty  much game quality. And 4 influences per vert max though most have no more than 2 influences.

Now I just need to figure out how to get my UVs to work. Haha

[JCarter426 1,214]

I've only ever manually weighted because I have a slow 3ds learning curve as well, and I agree with that assessment - not as bad as it seems... but still not fun.

 

I've never done a character UVW map from scratch so I don't know how much I have to add, but I can say that any of those modifiers definitely have to be below the skin and probably should be below Aurora/Odyssey Trimesh if you're using that. Oh, and Flex too. Basically, below everything. It's also a good idea to convert to editable mesh before mapping, but if you've done the skin already then you've probably done that.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

I've only ever manually weighted because I have a slow 3ds learning curve as well, and I agree with that assessment - not as bad as it seems... but still not fun.

 

I've never done a character UVW map from scratch so I don't know how much I have to add, but I can say that any of those modifiers definitely have to be below the skin and probably should be below Aurora/Odyssey Trimesh if you're using that. Oh, and Flex too. Basically, below everything. It's also a good idea to convert to editable mesh before mapping, but if you've done the skin already then you've probably done that.

You might be able to help me then. I actually already did the UV unwrapping in Maya. But I'm totally clueless as to bringing up those UVs in Max. Google seems equally clueless.

 

Edit:

 

 

UV Islands are right, but now I have no idea how to get my material to display. Also I have leftover Head Material in the scene. Do I need that?

[JCarter426 1,214]

Ah, I've never worked with Maya so I'm not sure. I would think, though, that it shouldn't really matter how you get the mesh in. So long as you're dealing with identical meshes, same vertices in the same place and so on, you can easily copy UVW and skin modifiers from one mesh to another. So you shouldn't have to worry about getting it from Maya onto that specific mesh. If you export as an OBJ or something and get it into 3ds textuerd correctly, you can unwrap it and then copy the skin over... I think.

 

If you do it that way, be sure to convert to editable mesh, center all pivot points, and Reset XForm in NWMax/KOTORMax before applying the skin.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

We have liftoff. We did it ladies and gentlemen. Ring the bell. I'm every woman. It's all in me. Confirmed.

Anything you want done baby, I do it naturally.


So now to get this into game I'm assuming I need to delete unused textures and from there I'm totally clueless.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

You'll need to rename your AuroraBase to a unique name and then change the supermodel to P_VisasBB. Export without animations. After exporting the ASCII, change the filename to something like XYZ_ASCII.mdl. Extract a copy of the binary P_VisasBB MDL and MDX, then rename them to your custom model's name (whatever XYZ is). Put them in the same directory with the ASCII then load up the ASCII with MDLOps, hit Read and Write Model. Fingers crossed it doesn't screw up and collapse your PC into a singularity. Your compiled model should be something like XYZ_ASCII-k2-bin. You can delete the renamed supermodel, then change your compiled model's filename to XYZ.

 

After that you'll want to edit appearance.2da and replace the references to P_VisasBB in her row. If you plan on making texture variants, you will need your texture names to conform to the format ABC01, ABC02, etc. In the texture columns of appearance.2da you just put the base ABC texture name. The item UTIs will specify the texture variant number.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

So, a few issues on that and then I swear I'm done being dumb. Haha

1.) What is the supermodel? Is that a controller somewhere I'm not seeing?

2.) It keeps saying that I need to weld all these verts and I'm unsure as to why? I thought that all the islands needed to be separate sub meshes?

[JCarter426 1,214]

1. A supermodel is just a different model that has animations on it, and then your model takes animations from that model instead of needing animations itself. That way different models can share animations. So in this case, the best course is to use P_VisasBB so both Visas models will have the same stuff. If you select the base and go to the modifier panel, it's the first textbox under MDL Base Parameters in NWMax. It says "Super:" and then next to that is what you enter.

 

For reference, almost every model in the game uses either S_Female03 (female) or S_Female02 (male, for some reason) as the supermodel. And they can be chained indefinitely, so P_VisasBB for example is parented to S_Female03 so she has her unique animations plus all the female ones. Anything higher in the chain will override anything lower.

 

2. What's warning you about them? If it's MDLOps and it's saying there are overlapping vertices, you can ignore it. Anything else, well, generally welding vertices is better than leaving them unwelded. Unless they're supposed to be weighted differently or part of different objects or elements, then there's usually no point to having them separate. I'm still speaking generally, but generally stuff only really needs to be on different elements if they have different smoothing groups and on different objects if they require different textures (that's a limitation of the game). Anything else is up to your personal convenience.

 

MDLOps does have some issues about the number of geometric vertices matching the number of texture vertices, but that's probably not an issue here yet.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

Okay so I figured out the supermodel. We're good there.

The next problem I'm dealing with is MDLOps is hanging on loading on model.

[JCarter426 1,214]

It probably isn't reading the "original" binary model. Since our collective knowledge of the model format is incomplete, MDLOps directly copies data from binary models during compiling to compensate. In other words, there are parts that it's unable to translate from ASCII to binary, so it just copies that data from an existing binary model.

 

Therefore, whenever you use MDLOps to compile something with animations (either on the model, or via a supermodel) you need to have an "original" binary model in the same folder. I'm using quotes all sarcastically because it does not have to be the actual original model. In this case you're making a new model, but it has to load a binary model from the game that it calls the "original" model. You can get different results by using different models, but generally you want the model that is most similar to yours, which is almost always whatever your supermodel is, though it's more of dark art than a science.

 

So in this case, extract P_VisasBB.mdl and P_VisasBB.mdx and rename them to match your model, YourModel.mdl and YourModel.mdx or whatever it's actually called.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

So maybe I missed a step. When exporting it it didn't export it to ASCII but vanilla MDL. :|
And now when I try to re-export from Max I'm getting a runtime error. I'm wondering if the export script was rewritten and needs to be replaced.

[JCarter426 1,214]

Oh, yeah, that's NWMax for you. That actually is ASCII, but you have to rename it to say that (for example, Model-ascii.mdl). And be careful about overwriting models by accident. when exporting because it will not warn you about that.

 

Easy way to check if it's ASCII or binary: open it in Notepad. If you can read it, it's ASCII.

 

Not sure about the runtime error, sorry.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

Hmmm. It's still hanging on loading original binary model.
Just when my hopes had soared. Now they sink.

[DarthParametric 3,782]

Typically when MDLOps hangs trying to compile it's because of an incorrect filename. If you want to post your models I'll take a look.

[Alan The Magic Goose 14]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6GSFmpZMBVRS2NLSjdpMjZYem8
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6GSFmpZMBVRNXAxWTBtc1FjZlk
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6GSFmpZMBVRSUtTemNqeTlJWkk

I hope it's just an incorrect file name. Haha

[DarthParametric 3,782]

It is. Your model is named VisasAssassin. You need to change the filename of the supermodel (i.e. P_VisasBB) to VisasAssassin.mdl/mdx