Body meshes

[jik]

Has anyone else taken a look at the body meshes? I was working some armor over and found that there are some "oddities" with them (or the black armor and the plate).

There seem to be way too many vertices in relation to faces... is there a reason for that? also, alot of the object edges (like middle seams) are not connected...

Another thing I have noticed is that the game must use 2-sided texturing, because a lot of the normals seem flipped...

In another thread, it was talked about making graphic improvements, I think it can be done, with some mesh optimization... Wonder if the 2 sided texturing can be turned off, it might make the game run better.

 

[Lurb]

I know how they work, but can't export them to OBJ. I could hack some blender scripts to handle them in a few minutes, but I'm lacking the minutes so far.
Once in blender they could be exported to various formats.

Also asigning the skinmesh vertex groups to a new mesh without the skeleton could be hard, as you would not be able to test the deformations. But I guess you could load a similar model and assign the vertex groups in a similar way.

I'm looking forward to loads of free time in the upcoming weeks to deal with all this.

 

[jik]

kool. not rushing you, but just updating where I was at.

 

[Yoshiboy]

all the things you talked about jik were most likely export malfunctions

 

[jik]

possibly, but even when I looked at some of the other meshes. Like the zendar ground. It's modelled to fit exactly where the buildings are not. It would be quite a bit more efficeint (again, I did not program the game, I'm going by what I know in general) to have a square map (which would only be 2 polys) as the ground for a scene area that is pretty much static.

 

[Thorgrim]

Not sure about the vertex problem, but I know for sure that the engine does not use double sided faces. Certainly not for the map, anyway (haven't checked the rest, but I assume they are the same). The BRF editor does export with some flipped you are right, however it imports them the right way, so make sure you flip them back if re importing an exported mesh. All backfaces are culled as you would expect.

As for mesh optimisations, sure there are many that could be done, but it really wont make a huge difference in most cases, and I think in general things are reasonably well optimised.

 

[Lemonfield]

My bro exported the plate armor some days ago to work over as a test project (before I told him to forget meshes with skeletons for now(better get on that lurb )) and there were definately oddities, exactly how you describe jik. I also exported a furlined helm (name escapes me now) and noticed the same things, along with another oddity: max was not letting me cut any of the faces. I haven't a clue as to the cause of that but it's never happened to me before. My guess is funny exporting for all the above problems.

Hopefully you mod tool gurus can get those exporting issues solved.

Question for you jik: what 3d app do you use, and have you gotten anything outof and back into the game successfully yet? I'm wondering if max is just effing things up, it does that sometimes.

 

[jik]

I use max7, but the export from there crashes the BRFview. What I do is work in max, export the OBJ file, open it in Wings3D (someone told me of this) and export it again as OBJ. The OBJ from Wings3D is fine. I've put it several weapons.

I was told the exporting is mostlikely the cause of the oddities.

As to slicing... that's strange. But then again, I mostly import the models from M&B as a baseline and create most of the stuff I've made from scratch (since it seemed the old geometery seemed odd)

Lurb, would ip be possible to have a poly/face/vertex count in the BRFviewer?

 

[[P]aradox]

The body meshes are different from the static meshes (swords and such). I've imported weapons and helmets directly into max 7, but body meshes are always screwed up. Lurb is well aware of the problem and he might already have a solution in mind.

 

[jik]

I've been able to import some of the armor meshes, which should be the same as the body meshes. I built some new armor meshes, but am waiting to implement them... well Lurb will get to it when he get's to it. Still lots to play with!