55 réponses à ce sujet

[Happycrow]

Ja, thanks.  By a complete fluke of history, I actually do.
So, when you move vertices, rather than "possibly altering the skin modifier," what 3ds Max should say is "will completely de-rig your model."  Who knew?

I went back to an earlier save-point, and played around with the still-rigged version, and now a lot of stuff that was mystifying me six hours ago now makes total sense.  Thanks everybody, I think I'm at the "I have achieved a clue and now just gotta do it" phase.

[Happycrow]

90% Mission Success!! (Uninvited Guests screenshots tomorrow night).
I figured out the envelop rigging. No wonder people don't like it, that's SERIOUSLY tedious.

BUT, I had one issue: when I moved the skeleton around to make sure it was rigged, apparently I threw it off-kilter from the MAIN skeleton used in game. So my guy went to talk to Pitney with his arms off-center to the armor texture beneath, and frankly, his left arm sort of akimbo like he was more inclined to sell the lizards makeup than hit them with a club. O.O

So when I go back in and start this up again, should I export the whole thing, being careful not to touch the skeleton for anything being exported, or should I "export selected" and only export the p_hhm_cl_gloves01 mesh? It would seem VERY awkward if any movements you made to skeleton bones at all threw these models off permanently.

[-Semper-]

i don't think that the tazpn's plugin exports skeletons, but i would in no case change the bones from their initial t-pose. dunno what you've done but it sounds like that you messed up the weighting and/or the parent-child relationship of the bones. to test your rigging you could add some simple keyframe animations and before exporting just fall back to frame 0.

btw if you animate you never move bones but helpers only. you should read lots of tutorials about ik/fk rigging. should not be hard to find the good stuff in the interweb^^
try to export everything what's needed.

[Happycrow]

 

Awful lot of back-and-forth just for that, huh?
This is the "Yeoman of the Greenwood" glove with the cuff widened and extended to go as far as it can up to the elbow without falling afoul of that silly "elbow sleeve blousing thing" the original designers made.  I've griped for years now about the bracer models all being ridiculously fat, and now I know why -- they gotta deal with those stupid huge elbows.  Problem is, so many other things are predicated on that, that I scrapped my previous attempts and ran it up as a tapered tube-style cuff.

I haven't uvunwrapped this sucker yet, so texturing it directly would have some distorted mesh and drive my guys nuts.

Thanks, everybody -- our insanely elegant custom armor system is going to STAY insanely elegant because I was able, with y'alls help, to do this.

Next up, rounding out the other races' gloves, rounding off genasi ears, and pulling the tusks out of half-orcs.

Modifié par Happycrow, 01 mai 2012 - 03:56 .

[Happycrow]

Thanks to Elysius' tutorial, which was so step-by-step even I could follow it, the gloves are uvunwrapped and ready to texture up.

Also... it told me what I was misunderstanding a couple years ago -- I wasn't COMPLETELY clueless, just not realizing that I'd completely missed a (rather important) step. So... brace yourself, Hellfire: Ettercap Lives!!

[Happycrow]

Followup question, gents: I tweaked one of the meshes a bit more, since there aren't a lot of Horc heads to start with, renamed the meshes for Head(x), renamed the materials, made sure they were rendering correctly, etc etc.... and either the rigging comes apart at the seams, or else it shows invisib le...so the game recognizes the head existing, but I'm forgetting something or skipping a step. Any ideas?

[Elysius]

What did you rename the head to, and what was its original name? Did you make a copy of the skeleton that the head uses and rename it so that its model number matches that of the head? In both cases, it isn't enough to rename the file. You need to rename the mesh as well as the skeleton's root bone to match their file names.

[-Semper-]

Elysius wrote...

You need to rename the mesh as well as the skeleton's root bone to match their file names.

a skeleton root (the name of the skeleton) is always the same, else meshes can't share them! never ever rename a skeleton or bone or your mesh won't work anymore.

@happycrow: did you double check your weighting map? creating or welting vertices will give them another id, thus influencing and therefore breaking the weighting.

Modifié par -Semper-, 15 mai 2012 - 05:20 .

[Happycrow]

Semper,

Yeah, that was clearly happening on some of the occasions -- spiky, nasty, not-a-face-land. I'll be sure to double-check. Unfortunately, that's not all of the problem, b/c I also get either that or "Mister Invisible Head" when all I've done is rename my mesh and retexture. Once again, I'm sure it's just some persnickety yet critical thing I haven't twigged to yet.

Side question from my "boss" I couldn't answer: we have three grey orc heads that are being reused/repurposed: if we want additional options which are purely variations on the texturing front (different tattoos, facepaint), can the MDB cloner be used for that, rather than hitting 3dsMax for EVERY alteration? I know it can be used for things like shields and tapestries, etcetera, but those aren't skin meshes. Makes a difference for whether I can let him go to town on that side while I press on with other stuff, or whether I have to do the whole thing on my own.

Thanks as always -- you guys are a huge help.

[-Semper-]

i never encountered invisible models. because they're appearing within the toolset the naming convention should be correct. perhaps it's a messed up uv map, missing textures or wrong/missing mesh properties. do you copy the dds files to your override folder? you could also check your texture for wrong alpha channels.

mdb cloner doesn't work well with multipart meshes. a head constists of the head mesh and the eyes, both with their appropriate textures. if you clone the head the eyes will lose their texture.
the easiest way would be to create your altered textures, import the model to 3dsmax, rename the meshes within max and link your new textures. after exporting there should be no problems because you never touched the geometry.

[Happycrow]

That's basically what I've been doing now. Argh. Okay, I'm obviously doing a bozo-no-no-level mistake. Will go back through slowly and carefully tonight and see if I can get it right. Thanks again.

[Happycrow]

Nope... still not getting it. The game reads that there's supposed to be an extra head, but it's completely blank. Is it possible that there's some 2da thing I need to tweak? I wouldn't have thought so for stuff sitting in override, but I'm kinda clueless here.

[-Semper-]

nope, the 2da is configured to the naming convention. as you said your head is selectable from the drop down within the toolset, therefore the name of the mesh is correct. could you upload the mdb with your textures so that i am able to look what's going wrong?

[Happycrow]

Thanks for the help, everybody: I sent Semper the mesh and he had zero trouble with it -- apparently I have an override conflict in there somewhere.

[Happycrow]

Semper and I stumbled onto something while he was helping me out -- I cleared my override, and the main texture displays just fine. L01 and L02, on the other hand, are all wacked out and don't display correctly at all; previously added characters changed to the new head have horrible weighting issues, and new chars posted with the new head fail to display at all. Semper says he can replicate the error but can't figure out what's causing it -- anybody got any ideas?

Thanks as always.

[Elysius]

I can take a look at your models if you email them to me. I'm not sure I can figure out what the problem is, but at least I can give it a try.

[Happycrow]

Sent; thanks as always.

[Elysius]

Is this the guy?

 

I don't see what the problem is.

 

Can you tell me what I should do to replicate the error?

[Happycrow]

Hrm... not the guy... don't know how that happened. I'll box the stuff up and re-send this evening. It's just a stock female air genasi head I was using to work the principle (because I had it handy while I was tweaking ear meshes to make them less elven-looking), should show in the toolset as female air genasi head four. Once it's there, 04 displays fine, L01 and L02 distort badly, and if you put a second one in the toolset, all you get is a pile of her gear.

[Elysius]

Oh, sorry. For some reason, I assumed it was a gray orc. I'm not familiar with some of the character models' codes. I'll test it again.

Edit: Ok, I've confirmed that there is a problem. I'll look into it.

Modifié par Elysius, 23 mai 2012 - 04:26 .

[Elysius]

 I couldn't take a serious look at the model until now as I had some real-life matters to attend to. Anyhow, a glance at what the model had -- or rather, what it didn't have -- clued me in on what was wrong.

Elysius wrote...

Did you make a copy of the skeleton that the head uses and rename it so that its model number matches that of the head?

 


To fix the problem, put a copy of the original model's skeleton in your override folder. Judging from appearances, the original model was probably P_HIF_Head01.MDB. If so, put a copy of P_HIF_skel01.GR2 in your override folder. Rename that copy to P_HIF_skel04.GR2. Run the game to test it.

Let us know if it works.

Edit:
Well, it ought to work.

 

Modifié par Elysius, 23 mai 2012 - 04:03 .

[Happycrow]

Thanks, I'll try it tonight. Those are in the LOD archive? (Though I'll eventually need to do so, I haven't yet touched skeletons and animation)

[Elysius]

Yes, they are in lod-merged_X1.zip.

[-Semper-]

ah, you ment this by renaming the skeleton... i completely forgot about those lod merged skeletons. btw were are they linked? within the 2da the head is linked to a p_hi?_skel. if you import the max displays the skeleton of the p_hh?_skel. it's a bit weird. seems like the importer does a buggy thing, which is also weird, because the model is skinned without problems to the hhf_skel.

also why does a creature with different heads, like the hags, work without additional skeletons?

Modifié par -Semper-, 23 mai 2012 - 07:15 .

[Elysius]

-Semper- wrote...

ah, you ment this by renaming the skeleton... i completely forgot about those lod merged skeletons.

Actually, you were right to correct me the first time. Even among head model variants, one should never change the name of the root bone. For head variants to work, however, they do need to have a copy of the skeleton they are using, and that copy's file name should have the same model number as that of the head. I wrongly assumed that the root bone's name should always match the skeleton's file name, but that did not turn out to be the case.

-Semper- wrote...

btw were are they linked? within the 2da the head is linked to a p_hi?_skel. if you import the max displays the skeleton of the p_hh?_skel. it's a bit weird. seems like the importer does a buggy thing, which is also weird, because the model is skinned without problems to the hhf_skel.

 


The importer is fine. It's NWN2 itself that's "weird." Allow me to explain.

What the 2DA file is telling us is that a genasi's body uses the same meshes, skeletons, and animations as humans. The head meshes and skeletons for genasi, however, are different from those of humans. If you open NWN2_Models_X1.zip, you'll find a few MDB files for genasi heads but not a single file for their bodies. Likewise, if you open lod-merged_X1.zip, you'll find skeletons for the genasi heads, but none for their bodies and no genasi animations.

OEI designed things this way to allow re-use of existing resources so that artists won't always have to re-invent the wheel. It's kind of a clever system, actually. For example, githyankis use the same skeletons as humans, but they have their own head and body models. This saves artists the trouble of having to make new animations for githyankis. At the same time, by allowing heads to use different skeletons from the original body model, artists can make subtle variations in the placement of bone joints for the head to account for their different appearance. This is true even within the same race. For example, if a new human head model had eyes that were closer together and placed higher in the head, its bones would have to be adjusted accordingly. To ensure that NWN2 uses the correct skeleton for each head model, the head's skeleton model number must match that of the head.

Now, here's where things get complicated. If a model uses an existing skeleton for its body but has a different skeleton for its head, the root bone of the head skeleton should be the same as that of the body. What's more, all the bones that are present in the body must also be present in the head skeleton. In other words, a head skeleton is structurally the same as the body skeleton on which it is based. The only differences are in the position and length of the head bones as well as the skeleton's file name. Even if the skeleton of the head model is no different from the original skeleton it was copied from, it will still need its own file copy with its model number matching that of the head for which it is intended.

So when you open a head model of a female air genasi, you'll find that its root bone is named P_HHF_skel. Rest assured that the importer made no mistake.

-Semper- wrote...

also why does a creature with different heads, like the hags, work without additional skeletons?

 


Actually, a hag has a different skeleton for each of its head models. They are named c_hag_skel01 to c_hag_skel03.

Apologies for the long post. I couldn't make it shorter without leaving out important information.

Modifié par Elysius, 24 mai 2012 - 01:46 .