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.