Quality limit for PCs in K1

[merkywatters 0]

Just getting back into modding this game. Been away for a while, but I've started to play it again recently. 

With the virtually endless supply of high quality 3d character models available online, is it feasible to take a non-game asset and make it work in K1? Does it make more sense to work on the assets from the game?

Is it even worth it? How much can we really improve PC quality in terms of vertexes/polygons or TGA resolution? 

 

[Stormie97 253]

The engine can handle many more polys than the vanilla model do have. @DarthParametric knows the actual facts and figures better than I do. No idea about textures sizes, but generally you can get very good results using 2K textures, or even by downsampling to 1K. Depends on the size of the model I'd say.

Recently Koru has shown some progress they've made on improving head models, it's looks really good. Personally I've been looking into remaking high-quality some body models but I'm not yet ready to show what I've come up with.

Regarding taking models available online: well it depends. If you're looking at a particular model, you have to figure out: where does it come from? Has it been ripped from another game without specific consent of the game's studio? Or did an artist make it and publish it onlline? Is it available for sale or do you plan to rip from a platform like, let's say, Sketchfab? If it's available for sale, what's the user agreement that comes with it? Would the author agree to have it ported to KoTOR as a mod? If none of those apply, was the model published as a free resource?

[merkywatters 0]

26 minutes ago, Stormie97 said:

where does it come from?

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, this would be a purchased model and I agree, there would need to be agreement from the artist. I'm more curious about things like the rigging and how that interacts with the game (not a 3d artist here). If the bones are similar to how a vanilla model works, will it simply work in the game? Or is there an assignment process that needs to be done? Maybe it's all handled in the Kotormax script? 

If someone was editing a model in 3DS max, imported via MDLops and Kotormax, can one edit so much as to cause errors? I don't fully understand the link between the outer polygons and the bones/rigging. 

[Stormie97 253]

Well basically when you take the bones together, they form a skeleton. A skeleton is then a set of primitive 3d objects, which are then animated. It's done that way because animating the models themselves would be tedious and you'd have to repeat the same steps for each model. Whereas by animating a common rig (skeleton), you can just fit your models around it and have them follow the movements of the rig.

KoTOR is no exception. If comes with a couple limitations, for instance each mesh has a maximum bones limit of 16. If you take a look at the vanilla models, you'll notice that they are generally seperated in 3 parts: Left arm, Torso, Right arm. That's because of the 16 bones per mesh limit. So generally I'd advise you to split your models in a similar fashion. Second limit is four 4 bones weights per vertices ; in other words, any single vertex can't be influenced by more than 4 bones. Honestly this is a non-issue, at least for body and head models. Most of the time you'll be weighting your vertices with respect to 2 bones, sometimes 3 at max. But it's important to know.

With that being said, if you acquire a 3d model online and it comes with it's own rig, I think it probably won't work within KoTOR, input from other modders in needed here. If that's the case you'd simply have to get rid of the skeleton it came with and rig the model with the KoTOR skeleton instead. It's not the most exciting part of bringing new models into the game, but it's necessary nonetheless. As I said, need confirmation from other modders on this.