Duster and other issues

--------------------------------  In response to a comment on YouTube about if I'll use the Portal 2 PTI editor or stick with Hammer. Original post here: http://rand0mnumbers.blogspot.com/2012/05/portal-2-map-maker-versus-authoring.html

 The argument of "easily roughing out a room" doesn't hold water with me. If I want to rough out I room, I want exactly that, a rough out. Simple walls thrown up with dev textures. Using the PTI gives you semi-polished rough outs. Panels all set and ready. Now, don't get me wrong, that can be extremely useful...if you aren't going to toss the entire thing into Hammer and have to deal with aforementioned 128x128x128 blocks (which are a completely valid way of blocking out a level) and then touch every element to make it easier to work with. I'm better off staying in Hammer. To save space, you can find the rest in my original post on this topic.

The blocks also annoy me because they remind me of my first run in with UnrealED in high school. Everything was subtractive brushes and models. We had limited modelling experience and were expected to use a model-based engine to build levels/games (it was a Video Game Design class). I had been using Hammer for about a year at that point.

Off topic: I hated that class. Why? The final was a game design doc that had to be completely filled out with a minimum number of pages per section and feature. I wrote down and fleshed out as much as I could using a 12pt font, but fell short of the minimum number of pages in a few sections. I can understand getting a low grade for that, but when classmates get high scores for using 20-60pt font to meet the minimum number of pages, that gets on my nerves. "But they thought outside the box!" Grr....

-------------------------------- In response to typing out my response to the above comment only to have errors popup everywhere

I'm really disliking YouTube right now. Every time I open a page, my keyboard input is immediately snatched by the player. This means that every single keybinding is fired off when I start typing in a comment box despite clicking in the comment section to give it focus (Fullscreen! Select button! Hit play! Pause! Change resolution! Mute! Pause! Play! AAAARRRRGGGHHH!). I have to hit escape half a dozen times to make flash realize I don't want it to have focus.

And another thing. Hitting Enter in comments posts the comment instead of starting a new line. I was halfway through a comment and, upon hitting enter, wound up posting it unfinished. That irks me to no end.

Maybe this is just that Flash Player bug. It completely crashes Firefox on Windows Server 2008 R2, but Windows 7 seems to tolerate it. How in the world did 11.3 get past QA? Does Adobe even use QA for Flash? Surely someone had the issue before release given. Do they not test on Firefox anymore (I think it works fine on every other major browser)?

-------------------------------- Duster model issues

I got the bone weights all set for the duster's light model, exported it into Skyrim, and watched the poly deformations work like I wanted them to...almost (more in a bit). So, I though I'd use the SoMuchMorpher plugin to bulk out the model and put my skin weights on it. Here's where the problem started: I exported the bulked out model. This changed the vertex numbering thus resulting in my character turning into an exploding ball of polygons. Each model works fine on their own, but naming them to work with the weight slider blows everything out of proportion, literally.

Okay, so I'll just go back and keep it in the scene instead. Wrong. I don't know how, but 3ds Max saved the changes to the skin modifier and, when I opened backup scenes, botched the weights when all I did was select the modifier on the stack. Now, the only working copy I have is the exported nif that, when imported, only imports as an Editable Mesh; severely limited the modelling options I usually have with Editable Poly. I can't convert to Editable Poly without deleting my fine tuned skin modifier.

Now, I think I'll have to duplicate the mesh, delete the skin modifier, convert to Editable Poly, copy/paste the Skin modifier or Skin Wrap it and hope that it works. I can't move the original around because it'll snap back to the skeleton and choose some arbitrary offset that I can't get rid of.

For making the bulky model work, I think I'll have to use the morpher, and add a 3rd skin wrap modifier to overwrite the weights with the ones I want, export, and hope that it doesn't screw with Skyrim's interpretation of the models.

Update on Duster:
It seems anything I do will destroy either the skin modifier or the vertex order, meaning the 3 hours I spent working on it have gone out the window. But at least I'm more familiar with weighting vertices.

There's also a big issue regarding the duster crumpling into itself because the female idle animation squashes body parts together. I don't know how I'm going to address this.

Current Projects: Leather Hat and Duster

A while back, I decided I'd try my hand at making 3d models of actual objects (and stuffing them into Skyrim). So, what better than to grab whatever is near me. In this case, I chose my hat.

Front view

I took several reference photos, put them up on reference cards in 3ds Max and had at it. It was a bit awkward using photo references and, in the end, I wound up making a slightly different shape and opted for Septims instead of buffalo coins.

The result. Hat, not swords.

An issue with the hat is it is tilted too far forward. On human female heads, it looks okay, but on human male heads it is a bit too close. The main issue I'm concerned about is it doesn't cover the seam when only the top part of my character's hair is covered. The hair is removed in a jagged line that shows bald spots in some places whereas others have hair under the hat. There's yet another issue regarding lighting. For some weird reason, the hat lights up but light still passes through it.

After making the hat, I figured I might as well make clothes to go with it. This was further reinforced when someone commented on the hat when I released the Vigilance Longsword on the Skyrim Workshop. So, I downloaded a 3ds Max Garment Maker tutorial from iwkya1's YouTube channel (I've followed a few of his tutorials before) and went straight to making a leather duster. Specifically, the one I have in my room.

However, I didn't use references this time around. Instead, I copied the layout of the tutorial and made my own modifications as I was watching. From there, it was a day of tweaking seams, collision, and cloth properties to get what I wanted.

The result:

I don't have a shirt or pants to go with this, so the player is currently hollow. There's also an issue with the SoMuchMorpher tool not assigning graduated bone weights; meaning the fabric gets ripped during animations (Example: The tail moves like two pieces of cardboard instead of stretching over an area like fabric).

The duster is a single sided model, so I had to use the SF_DoubleSided shader flag in Nifskope. There is an issue with the model seeing through itself. I removed the unnecessary alpha properties I put on it, but the issue persists in the inventory view. For a doublesided model reference, open up the Emperor's clothes (meshes\clothes\emperor\emperoroutfitf_0.nif) and look at the node structure.

I got the invisible mesh error when I tried to import the duster. A combination of purging all bones (both Skyrim's imported skeleton and SoMuchMorpher's) from the scene, deleting all the morpher's modifiers, and copying a working LightingShaderProperty from another mod into the reexported .nif resulted in an error thrown by the Creation Kit, a clear sign the models will show (for me at least). I find that if I'm not getting an error, something is wrong with my nif. Yet, if I get an error, all is well. Go figure.

I've since raised the collar to cover up the empty space resulting from the game hiding the body mesh. If you load the human references from the character assets folder (head, body, hands, underwear, and feet), you can see where those empty spaces will show up.

I still have to come up with a shirt and pants (they had denim back then, didn't they? :P ) and correct all the erroneous bone weights. Needless to say, I have my work cutout for me.

Texturing just got streamlined

Okay, so, when I export a model's UV to Photoshop, I use 3ds Max's "Render UV template" function. This produces a raster image I then import into Photoshop and trace vectors over. Needless to say, this can get tedious. Especially when I make major changes to the UV.

So, I sought out a way to turn those vertices on the UV into vertices on a vector. In the end, I came across Render Pass Manager's PSDPathUnwrapper...and it works beautifully.

The mesh in 3ds Max

The resulting path in Photoshop

  Now, I can simply apply the mesh's path to a layer and cut out the bits I want instead of tracing using the Pen tool. I've already made major changes to the UV and they only took a couple minutes to setup again in Photoshop. No moving around, no zooming in to the pixel level to align vertices, and no complete retraces for broken/merged elements.

Vigilance Longsword - Progress

In my attempts to duplicate the Vigilance Longsword from the Dragon Age game series, I've come up against quite a conundrum: Adding the gold filigree.

I want it in physical detail because a) it makes occlusion better and b) it really helps align textures. The problem I'm having is not making, but rather conforming it to the base mesh.

Base on left (purple). Filigree on right (the splines).

I created polys, gave them dimension, and smoothed them, but they were completely flat on one side. This wasn't a problem for the greatsword as it was pretty much entirely flat. The longsword is anything but. The design is more, I guess, organic with a lot of curved surfaces that make slapping flat details on a problem. I tried using conform, but that flattens the filigree and introduces weird artifacts (i.e. it stretches polygons through the model for some reason).

So, I've selected the borders I had on the open sides and created splines from them (the "create shape from selection" option). Next up, I'm going to increase spline interpolation, reshape as needed, conform the edited splines, get the outlying vertices matched up with the base mesh ('snap to surface' and 'axis constraints' toggles combined with the move tool), and use a series of modifiers to give it all dimension.

I don't think I'll cut out the filigree and fuse it to the base mesh like I did for the greatsword. That introduces too many polys. Additionally, I'll probably use the texture I made the normal map instead of generating one from a meshsmoothed highpoly version of the model. From experiments on the greatsword, this method produces better results in-game and means I don't have to comb a 20k+ poly mesh for imperfections introduced by MeshSmooth (Although, generating and AO or normal map from that will show you where the imperfections are. Just look for odd shadows or broken gradients).