Recent content by Scaevolus

Xenigma said:

Ok so i got my first model textured this is what i ended up with.

(...)

Sorry for the amount of pictures.

Id like your evaluation, this is my first model, so any tips are welcome

(And i know the rim at the handle is a bit dull.. but i messed around with it quite long and couldn't get it right)

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If you're gong for historical accuracy on the Pompeii gladius, you're almost there: 

-I'd remove the blood groove down the middle and replace it with a flat grind bevel on both sides.  Guard to tip. 
-There's no ricasso on a gladius.  I saw the picture you based your model on (from wikipedia, am I right?) and that sword has a ricasso, which is a no no. 
-A round grip is fine, though most of the grips were hexagonal or octagonal and made of bone (though wood is fine too, if it's for a recruit).  You can make the grip hex or oct and then make those edges hard to prevent them from blending. 
-The guard is great except for one thing: the steel plate "ring" you have there.  You have two options (my opinion) - you can have an actual plate that covers the entire face of the guard, and make it slightly thinner than you have now, or just use a texture to give the appearance of an inset plate on the face of the guard.  I'll put up some pictures to show what I mean by all these recommendations. 

Barf said:

the only thing weird I noticed is on the cross-guard, the largest pointy thing is inverted near the tip and goes inside out.
other than that I dont get any extra lines or weirdness in max, do the ghost lines persist after you triangulate?.
edit: also noticed the point on the pommel, the tiny one is also inverted.

btw: the sword is definitely well made for a beginner, keep it up
oh yeah if the sword looks right when you triangulate the mesh before importing into brf, just ignore the lines.

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I'll definitely look to fix the inversion areas.  I think Khandrak might have it right in his assumption that by moving the virtices around from the basic shape I had, I crossed planes.  That might be why I'm seeing the ghost lines.
And when I triangulate, the ghost lines disappear but I'm left with a massive poly count.
Thanks for the thumbs up and for taking the time to check for mistakes!

Khandrak said:

What I did notice was that in your unmirrored model, there are some edges that are going through your model. That's probably what your problem is. My guess here is that you started with a basic shape and moved the vertices around into funky positions, but you moved some that were connected across the bottom of your model up so that their lines now move through the model.

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I definitely started with a basic shape and moved the vertices around like crazy to get the shape I needed.  Since I'm completely new to this, I probably did exactly as you described.  I'll look into it.

Khandrak said:

Some tips:
You made it way too complex. The curves have too many vertices and the handle has far too many. You have to think about this objectively as you're making it. 100 people running around the battlefield with a 2000 polygon sword is a bit much. You'll get better at making things look good with less.

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Good point.  I remember editing the Black Hood a while back in Wings and immediately noticing that it wasn't round at all.  The faces were large, flat, and few.  Gonna have to delete some edges on my sword then, since when I triangulate I'm getting 1600 or so poly's and that's waaaay too much, I know.

Khandrak said:

You need to make some of the edges hard. The way edges normally are, they round and smooth when it's actually being done in game. This is quite problematic with things like the edge of your sword, or the point where the sword meets your hilt. If you leave it how it is, you'll have a smooth, rounded mess. Click the shaded cube in the top right corner of wings to see what I mean. So, what you need to do is go into edge mode, and select all of the edges that you don't want to round. The edges of the blade. The part where it starts to taper. Where it meets the hilt. The outside edges of those bumps on the handle. Et cetera. Then right click, hardness -> hard.

To triangulate, select your whole model in face mode, right click, tessellate -> triangulate. That'll do it for you. If your model isn't triangulated, it's going to look like a funky piece of **** with holes in brfedit.

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I had been wondering how I was going to make the blade bevel look like one instead of it being blended/curved.  You just answered that question.  Before triangulating, I exported it as an .obj and when I got it into BRFEdit it looked like **** just as you said.  I was thinking "All this damn work for nothing" till I triangulated.  Awesome.  And with hard edges, it'll look THE ****. Not like ****.  Thanks for the mini-tut.  Much appreciated!

Thanks guys for all your answers and knowledge.  Even though I barely know what I'm doing, I know tons more now that I've asked some questions.

Barf said:

I think your problem is with faces that have over 5 sides. You must cut them in sections, otherwise the program will have a hard time understanding the shape of your polygon.

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That might be part of the problem. Unfortunately, even with all the curves (especially on the handle) being cut and connected as opposed to a single face, I'm still getting all the unselectable ghost lines.

Barf said:

before you export to brf make sure you triangulate your mesh...I would open your file and confirm this but 3dsmax cant open wings files...obj would have worked.

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Honestly this is my first attempt at modelling, which is likely why I'm having so many problems.  I'm sifting through Luigi's various tutorials trying to figure out how to UV map, triangulate, etc. 
And here I thought I could just make whatever I wanted and then POOF put it in game and start lopping off people's heads.

I just added a .obj file for you, Barf.

spectre: said:

Hm. Weird If you take a closer look, all those ghost lines converge at one vertex. You might wan to see what happens if you delete that but most likely it'll tell you that it'll cause a badly deformed face. Try moving it instead and see if the lines move along, and if you can select the lines afterwards.
Would be easier if I could fiddle around with the file.

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I'm pretty sure that if I delete the vertex they converge on, they will all move to the next closest vertex.

I've uploaded a few .wings save files for you guys to play around with if you want.
Below is a direct link to the "Dark Elf Scimitar" folder which includes the saves. (uploaded on MediaFire):

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=ac5b4fbe9e01cde9ab1eab3e9fa335ca9f03507b8d3dda88
Folder Includes:
-Dark Elf ScimitarFINAL.wings (Deleted curve edges.  Mirrored the bottom face to create the final sword.)
-Dark Elf Scimitar FINAL SCALED.wings (Final mirrored sword and scaled to match a standard size M&B sword)
-Dark Elf ScimitarCurveEdges.wings (When making the huge bevel, I connected all the curve vertexes. Why? Dunno.)
-Dark Elf ScimitarUnmirrored (Unmirrored sword, the object is only half the sword)
-Dark Elf Scimitar Final Scaled OBJ.obj (Sword exported into .obj format)

I'm also having trouble importing this into BRFEdit. Why does the .obj look the way it does when exported from Wings3d and imported into BRFEdit?

spectre: said:

Is it an export from another format? Or were you doing some crazy subdividing? Mirroring perhaps?

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It's a brand new model, no importing or exporting.  If you mean crazy subdividing as in cutting an edge into several vertexes then yes. I definately mirrored the bottom face to make it complete but those lines were showing up before any mirror.

spectre: said:

Anyways, you may try to select and delete them and see what happens. If nothing, most likely they weren't necessary anyways. If it doesn't mess up your normals and textures, you just might ignore them, because if it is because you joined separate models or imported, it can be fixed but will be a PITA.

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Unfortunately I cannot select them.  When using Ctrl-A to select all edges, these "ghost" lines are not selected.  I made it all from one cube and never imported any other objects.  Not sure what a PITA is, though.

Here's another few shots showing all real edges selected and the black lines are the "ghost" lines:

This being the first model I've ever made I figured I'd tackle something pretty detailed.  This is a Dark Elf sword based on some Warhammer concept art.

The sword:

http://g.imageshack.us/img152/ss333mx7.jpg/1/

Another view showing all edges and the massive bevel:


The concept art:


Since the handle is just going to be covered up by the hand most of the time, I didn't make it too detailed.  I also elongated the handle since I prefer bastard style hand-and-a-half swords.  I even "toned-down" the pommel, because who wants a large spike slitting your wrist open when you're in the heat of battle.  Looks good in concept art but isn't practicle.

HokieBT said:

I think if they have the 'guaranteed ranged' checkbox they are considered archers, if they have 'guaranteed horse' they are considered calvary, otherwise they fall into the infantry group.  You probably just need to un-check the guarantee ranged checkbox for a few troops.

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You're right, HokieBT.  Right after I posted the question I checked and had forgotten to un-check "Ranged" from "Guarantee" and yes that does change them to infantry.  I had given them throwing daggers and wanted them all to have them which is why I used the guarantee.  Tried the new infantry without "Ranged" checked and they now follow infantry commands.  So thanks for the confirmation.

It's just like Huscarls which follow the infantry commands but have throwing axes.  I looked at them with the troop editor and sure enough they don't have a ranged guarantee. 

So the short answer for others is that the "Guarantee" boxes classify a troop to be either infantry/archer/cavalry.

I've changed the mercenaries into new infantry, archer, cavalry troops (new names, armor, stats, etc.) but I can't get them to follow my commands correctly in-game.

The infantry follow my archer commands and yet have no ranged weapons.

How do I go about classifying the troops into archer/infantry/cavalry categories?

Eagle114th said:

Scaevolus said:

Dude, you forgot "and God bless".

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What does 'god bless' have to do with this thread?

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Psh, do I need to insert a link to sarcasm? What a facepalm your posts are.
You have taken up the crusade to respond to every nay-say post here.
Supporters are saying "why do you guys give a **** if it fails or not?" while the same question can be directed at you.
Why do you care?  It fails or it don't.  Duh.  Either join the team or shut off the words spewing from your ass.

What if...what if YOU are l3asu?  Oh my god that would explain everything.  Except your poor grammar which is likely a cover.
It wouldn't surprise me a bit.  I saw that type of thing on the Shadowbane forums all the ****in time.  It's pitiful.

I'm trying to export some smd's for armor skinning but BRF keeps CTD.  Seems random.
Some armors work with the export, others don't.

Any tricks with the smd exporter I should know?

Eagle114th said:

Thank you very much for posting this.  You just cracked me up your few first lines.  I've been in long brawl with these people for a very long time.  Your team just bought me a hope for a new MP.  Even if its a tiny hope, I stilll hold that hope.  GO FOR IT and do whatever it take for your team to stick together and take a small step a time into building MP mod for Mount and Blade.

And I truly hope that all of you success in what all of you envisioned of doing for Mount and Blade without any problems.  And at the same time, I also hope that your team's hard efforts will be recognized by Mount and Blade dev. team as well.

(thumbs up)

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Dude, you forgot "and God bless".

HokieBT said:

The basic concept is some data is saved in the saved game file (I know individual troop stats are) and some data is always read from the text files.  unfortunately only the M&B developers could probably tell is if this switched between versions and what data is always read from the text files, etc....

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I figured as much regarding that data being stored in the saved game file.
Thanks for the input.

If you're looking to change the entire model or alter its actual shape, I'd go for Wings3D like Thymo suggested.  Wings3D is free.

If you just want to change the texture (color, etc.) I use Photoshop but there are several very similar programs out there.  Photoshop is not free through legal means.

I was able to change the inventory of troops in .960 and see the changes instantly.
However, when I change a certain troop's inventory in 1.003...nothing happens.

If I'm removing a troop's armor and weapons and giving him a completely different set of items, why is he still showing his original items (and not the new items) in game?  Where the heck is he getting his original items from?

Starting a new game fixes this of course but I've done too much in game to do that right now.