Modelling edits for Area Models and their various trials

[DarthParametric 3,898]

Phew, ok, there are are raft of problems here, both on the model/game side and the geometry side. First off, this appears to be oddly scaled, halfway between medium and large. It is simply named "PMBC", which neither game uses. It won't do anything if dropped into the override in its current state, as all body models require a size designation, even in TSL. It's using the wrong supermodel. It is missing most of the hooks/dummies for VFX and the like. For some reason you have a VFX emitter sitting around head height. The arms and torso were assigned different textures. This ultimately would be overridden by the 2DA in normal use anyway, but I gather this was intentional.

As far as the collar mesh itself goes, it looks to have been moved at some point during proceedings, so it is completely offset from where it should be. Even when repositioned, the neck plug does not align with an attached head. The outer edges of the collar also don't appear to mate cleanly with the torso. It has been assigned a different texture with separate UVs, which won't work if you intend to use it with regular texture variations, as all mesh-assigned textures will be forcibly overridden by the one assigned in the 2DA. It has incorrect bone assignment. It's weighted to "torso" i.e. the skinned torso mesh. The bone is "torso_g", and that's not even the right bone anyway. It needs to be weighted to "torsoUpr_g".

I've addressed the mesh issues. I ended up scrapping half of the geometry and replacing it, and created new UVs that use the vanilla textures. You need to provide some info on what the goal of this is though before proceeding further. If you intend for this to be a simple Override drop-in, which is what I gather from your "nothing new" statement above, then there is further remedial work required.

[Malkior 480]

2 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

Phew, ok, there are are raft of problems here, both on the model/game side and the geometry side. First off, this appears to be oddly scaled, halfway between medium and large. It is simply named "PMBC", which neither game uses. It won't do anything if dropped into the override in its current state, as all body models require a size designation, even in TSL. It's using the wrong supermodel. It is missing most of the hooks/dummies for VFX and the like. For some reason you have a VFX emitter sitting around head height. The arms and torso were assigned different textures. This ultimately would be overridden by the 2DA in normal use anyway, but I gather this was intentional.

As far as the collar mesh itself goes, it looks to have been moved at some point during proceedings, so it is completely offset from where it should be. Even when repositioned, the neck plug does not align with an attached head. The outer edges of the collar also don't appear to mate cleanly with the torso. It has been assigned a different texture with separate UVs, which won't work if you intend to use it with regular texture variations, as all mesh-assigned textures will be forcibly overridden by the one assigned in the 2DA. It has incorrect bone assignment. It's weighted to "torso" i.e. the skinned torso mesh. The bone is "torso_g", and that's not even the right bone anyway. It needs to be weighted to "torsoUpr_g".

I've addressed the mesh issues. I ended up scrapping half of the geometry and replacing it, and created new UVs that use the vanilla textures. You need to provide some info on what the goal of this is though before proceeding further. If you intend for this to be a simple Override drop-in, which is what I gather from your "nothing new" statement above, then there is further remedial work required.

     I'm so sorry you had to deal with my haggard mess of a modeling job. At least I know some of what I did wrong.

So, the reason the head is offset is because when I tried to import my edited ASCII model back into Gmax, the head was 150 px too high and somewhat too far forward on the neck; so I made those adjustments and upon reopening it, the head seemed to be in the right place.(Since it wasn't showing in game I tried literally everything I could think of) Upon reflection, I can guess that reopening the same exported file back into GMax has bizarre consequences as has become fairly evident.

I have not idea where the emitter came from or and explanation for the odd scaling. I wish I could provide more insight, but frankly I'm as confused as ever on how that happened. (I hit "export with animations" instead of "geometry only" would that have been what did it?)

The arms and torso have different textures because I wanted to see the model with its texture in GMax, and the preview button just wasn't working (Apologies, I didn't think it would translate to the export nor that the arms and torso had their own texture assignments)

The goal is indeed a simple replacement job as far as changing the corresponding armor to have collars at the neck. The vanilla armor design terminates exactly at the head cap and looks distractingly ridiculous. (Like they vacuformed the collars to the wearer.) No need to make new UTI files, just add collars to the original armor.

 

The way I modeled it was by cutting a square shape at the back of the neck and wrapping that extruded piece around the entire collar. Obviously, there are better and easier ways to do this, but it was the only one I knew. If there are any specific issues you saw when removing the geometry, I am very interested in them because sadly, that was the best I could do with my limited understanding of modeling and I would love to hear of ways to improve.

 

I am listing all of these details in the hope that others may learn from this experience so that they may not fall into the same pratfalls as I myself have. I thank you for the continued assistance, and hopefully the next steps will get a bit easier..

[DarthParametric 3,898]

I kept the collar itself, I just repositioned the verts a bit, mating them to the torso hole and making the top curve a bit more consistent. It was the neck plug that I replaced, which was a separate piece in your original. I just added in some new geometry to bridge the inner walls of the collar itself and snapped the inner ring to the neck of an imported head.

As to changing the texture assignment, like I said above that doesn't really matter, since the entire model gets forcibly assigned a texture via the 2DA anyway.

The more concerning elements are how you managed to change the scale, and how you managed to change the hierarchy (including adding an emitter). Exporting with animations wouldn't do that. It doesn't do anything unless the base has animations on it. Since the model has no inherent anims, it functions exactly the same as exporting geo only. If you were saving it as a GMax file, maybe there was some unit conversion screwiness going on there that would explain the scale problem. Maybe there was also some problem with it incorrectly storing object types. A question for @bead-v no doubt.

Edit:

Haven't tried the TSL version, but here it is in K1:

Here are the files. Adjust to taste.

ASCII_Models.7z    K1_Binary_Models.7z    TSL_Binary_Model.7z

[Malkior 480]

23 hours ago, DarthParametric said:

I kept the collar itself, I just repositioned the verts a bit, mating them to the torso hole and making the top curve a bit more consistent. It was the neck plug that I replaced, which was a separate piece in your original. I just added in some new geometry to bridge the inner walls of the collar itself and snapped the inner ring to the neck of an imported head.

As to changing the texture assignment, like I said above that doesn't really matter, since the entire model gets forcibly assigned a texture via the 2DA anyway.

The more concerning elements are how you managed to change the scale, and how you managed to change the hierarchy (including adding an emitter). Exporting with animations wouldn't do that. It doesn't do anything unless the base has animations on it. Since the model has no inherent anims, it functions exactly the same as exporting geo only. If you were saving it as a GMax file, maybe there was some unit conversion screwiness going on there that would explain the scale problem. Maybe there was also some problem with it incorrectly storing object types. A question for @bead-v no doubt.

Edit:

Haven't tried the TSL version, but here it is in K1:

Here are the files. Adjust to taste.

ASCII_Models.7z 91.62 kB · 1 download     K1_Binary_Models.7z 273.24 kB · 1 download     TSL_Binary_Model.7z 128.36 kB · 1 download

Awesome. The files work perfectly in TSL.

 

Thank you for fixing up the files. After looking over your edits, I think I've gleaned a few things I need to focus on. Namely, not to assign random textures, but also to ensure the edges line up cleanly with the original and to make sure the cap is properly kept on the torso model. (I'm not exactly sure how you made it float there, but I could probably guess you either created the polygons or just re-imported the original model and copied its geometry; either way, thank you for fixing that)

I plan to send a copy of my GMax file to bead-v in the hope that he can figure out what went wrong with my file.

I might tweak the collar a bit to give it a bit more emphasis. (In case you were curious which direction I was going with this artistically, here's the admittedly strange reference photo I'm using.

 

[DarthParametric 3,898]

The torso neck plug is floating because I just deleted the surrounding polys. It was a useful reference point that I could snap the collar to, since what I ended up doing was getting rid of your original body and then importing the three K1 size variants one after the other and scaling/positioning the collar to fit. If I were doing it for myself, I would have welded it all back together as a single mesh, but it was more beneficial for you to keep it separate so you could see how it all went together, and more easily make changes if needed.

As to the collar style you were modelling after, I thought there was at least one example along those lines in one of the games. The problem with high collars though is that they would likely need neck_g weights. The standard part system body rigs typically don't include anything above torsoUpr_g, so you'd have to add in the extra bone/s. That aside, in my experience, high collars are a pain in the ass due to their tendency of bad deformation with any sort of moderate neck/head movement. A low-ish static open collar like you have now is way less hassle. Although KOTOR's animations are pretty limited, at least in cutscenes where you'll be getting most of your close-up shots, so it may not be as big a deal.

[bead-v 252]

5 hours ago, Malkior said:

I plan to send a copy of my GMax file to bead-v in the hope that he can figure out what went wrong with my file.

You know, my guess is as good as yours. People forget sometimes, but I don't actually have a lot of experience with modeling or working with gmax (and 0 exp with 3ds for that matter).

Anyway to figure this out, you need to isolate the thing you did that caused this. From just a static gmax file it won't be possible to figure out what action caused the state, you need to try a bunch of things you did to the original, check after every single action and see at what point the problem appears.

[DarthParametric 3,898]

You're not omnipotent?!

[Malkior 480]

13 hours ago, bead-v said:

You know, my guess is as good as yours. People forget sometimes, but I don't actually have a lot of experience with modeling or working with gmax (and 0 exp with 3ds for that matter).

Anyway to figure this out, you need to isolate the thing you did that caused this. From just a static gmax file it won't be possible to figure out what action caused the state, you need to try a bunch of things you did to the original, check after every single action and see at what point the problem appears.

Heh. There's a lot of steps I took, but I remember some of it. (and a lot of it is listed in this very thread) However, the most puzzling thing for me has to be how the emitter was added where my edited model was supposed to be. My only guess could be that there is something on the left toolbar that I accidentally clicked, or perhaps it happened when I was creating polygons to fix the gaps..

[DarthParametric 3,898]

2 minutes ago, Malkior said:

there is something on the left toolbar that I accidentally clicked

Some of your problems definitely come from doing things you shouldn't have. In this instance, a simple mesh edit, you should not have needed to touch the KMax toolbar after the initial ASCII import.

[Malkior 480]

57 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

Some of your problems definitely come from doing things you shouldn't have. In this instance, a simple mesh edit, you should not have needed to touch the KMax toolbar after the initial ASCII import.

Indeed. That's why I needed the help. I would have pressed all of those wrong buttons and more on my own.

For example, the Oddysey Base isn't actually called "Oddyseybase" It's listed in the items as the name of the model file "PMBC" One of the reasons I clicked that toolbar was because there was an option called "Oddysey Base" that assigned and changed what the parents and children were (which is what lead to the screwy hierarchy)

[DarthParametric 3,898]

Well that's because "OdysseyBase" is an object type, not a name.

There always has to be some level of assumption in advice, lest you write a telephone book-sized blow-by-blow account for even the simplest of tasks.

[Malkior 480]

2 minutes ago, DarthParametric said:

Well that's because "OdysseyBase" is an object type, not a name.

There always has to be some level of assumption in advice, lest you write a telephone book-sized blow-by-blow account for even the simplest of tasks.

Indeed. In fact the purpose of me cataloging each of these simple tasks as I learn them is to help those who have as limited of a knowledge base as my own to avoid similar misunderstandings. Hopefully with time and experience, I will be able to streamline this process and maybe create some tailored tutorials along the way.

[DarthParametric 3,898]

One day, many moons from now, we may get a wiki for that sort of thing.