Maveritchell wrote:The texture's 512^2... but in regards to the quality, I was working with screenshotted components, and with some of them, regardless of how much I sharpened them, they look subpar.

no matter how hard you try, photosourced skins always look like total crap, best to just paint them yourself.

yep. For a 512 it looks pretty blurry. Better paint it from scratch and use photosource if you need them. (not screenshots of finished textures, photos of metal and stuff, you took)

I think it may be wise, unless your going all out and want to really get good at skinning in xsi or whatever, to just get the rough color and textures set up for the model, and when its exported, go back over them with higher resolution skins, and fix em up (darken the colors, add contrast, etc).

I've currently got someone to export the T3-model, and I'll work more on textures once I get it ingame and do some side-by-side comparisons to other units. For now, I've started working on the mining droid model, which will be a harder project for a number of reasons:

1) It has to be better, as it will be used for three units, not just one.

2) It needs to be integrated with a skeleton, because it can't just "roll" like the T3.

3) XSI Modtools can't import psych0fred's bones, so I'll need to lean heavily on anyone who would be willing to help me (read: do a significant amount of work) put those bones onto this model and get it ingame. Textures are not even a concern right now, I can just UV map it and work on that later.

WAAAAAAAAAAAY too many polies on that droid, especially on those cylinders, click on them and hit enter to open the properites and change the V to 1 and base to 1 and then delete the vert in the center and draw edges using "\" going either horizontally or vertically to get the best result.



also dont use hidden line removal, its so fugly and you cant see textures in that mode. if you wanna see the wireframe over the model but still see textures and depth just click on the button to change the view from hidden line removal to textured decal, then click on that button again and at the bottom click on display options to open that box i have in my screen and check "show wirefram on unselected objects" then scroll to the bottom of that dialogue box and check "enable headlight" so you dont have those annoying shadows on the back-left of all your models.

minilogoguy18 wrote:WAAAAAAAAAAAY too many polies on that droid, especially on those cylinders, click on them and hit enter to open the properites and change the V to 1 and base to 1 and then delete the vert in the center and draw edges using "" going either horizontally or vertically to get the best result.

also dont use hidden line removal, its so fugly and you cant see textures in that mode. if you wanna see the wireframe over the model but still see textures and depth just click on the button to change the view from hidden line removal to textured decal, then click on that button again and at the bottom click on display options to open that box i have in my screen and check "show wirefram on unselected objects" then scroll to the bottom of that dialogue box and check "enable headlight" so you dont have those annoying shadows on the back-left of all your models.

Do I get the same poly reduction if I just delete the inner points on those joints (I assume those are the cylinders you're talking about)? I tried that, and the model doesn't break apart. It's basically this:



As compared to this:



There's no UV map made yet, and consequently viewing the decal mode is the same as shaded mode. Shaded by itself looks bad, and I could've chosen shaded and just highlighted the model, but I chose to do hidden line removal. It looks more or less the same at this point.

you also have the cylinders divided along the V plane, and its better to draw the edges over the cap like in my screen so that the game doesnt triangulate them in a funny way and mess up the normals. what i also just showed you above will keep you from having those dark areas on your model, i know you quoted my post but read it more carefully.

minilogoguy18 wrote:you also have the cylinders divided along the V plane, and its better to draw the edges over the cap like in my screen so that the game doesnt triangulate them in a funny way and mess up the normals. what i also just showed you above will keep you from having those dark areas on your model, i know you quoted my post but read it more carefully.

I follow you, and I'll try and add those edges in - I just don't, and didn't, quite understand what you mean by "dark areas on your model." Is this something that actually affects the model's appearance ingame, or just something purely aesthetic for working with it in XSI? Because honestly, if it's the latter, I don't see it as being a big deal.

Welcome to a new episode of
"Learning useless stuff with DooFi:"
Edges (and vertices) that do not coin the actual shape of your model, are unnecessary. Delete them, or even better: Don't create them^^.
Only use non-shaping-edges when you are modeling for an engine that uses Vertex-Lighting. For example if you model a very long pipe or hose or whatever, the lighting information will be stretched all over the model if you dont have some edges dividing the pipe. I believe SWBF2 uses vertex-lighting, but since your model has no such huuge polies, you dont need to crap up your tri-count by dividing polys for better lighting. In some cases it can even provoke worse lighting. So always think of how your model will be used, when modeling.

Mr. Optimist ops in to say:

"That's a really swell model you've got there Maveritchell!"

Seriously, it's awesome. Looks like your map will have alot of potential...and I could end up needing some of your models.
Anyways, yeah. Thought I'd break the theme of constructive critisism and bring a bit of appreciation into your life.

Epena wrote:Mr. Optimist ops in to say:

"That's a really swell model you've got there Maveritchell!"

Seriously, it's awesome. Looks like your map will have alot of potential...and I could end up needing some of your models.
Anyways, yeah. Thought I'd break the theme of constructive critisism and bring a bit of appreciation into your life.

I appreciate it, but I appreciate the criticism as well, because I'm learning to model on the fly. I watched about half of a tutorial video and then jumped in. Everything since then has been trial and error, so every bit of trial I can eliminate is appreciated.

And as soon as I get the skins up to snuff (and hopefully get the mining droid working; I realized I could do exporting myself with the Foundation demo - whoops) and the map done or mostly done, I'll release the source files to the units. I'm all about sharing of resources. (And if someone like you or Gogie needs them earlier, since I know you're both working on legitimate KOTOR maps, I'd be happy to release them to you earlier.)

EDIT: I brought the T3 model ingame, and for some reason, it's sunk into the ground. Any guesses as to why? The model was sitting on the XZ-plane.

probably because you have the dummyroot in the center of the model when it needs to be on teh floor, anything that traverses along the ground like walkers and units have thier dummyroot on the XSI floor, and you probably dont have a collision set up nor are the transforms the way they need to be.

No (I exported the model), I froze the transforms on the geometry and placed dummyroot at the origin of the scene.

The problem was on my end; I incompletely exported the model.

I went and set the dummyroot at the bottom of the model, and made sure to freeze all transforms. Creating the collision, however, is something I didn't do, apparently, because when I munged the model into my map, I got the following MungeLog:

WARNING[PC_modelmunge msh\t3mod.msh]:t3mod has 2586 vertices and NO COLLISION GEOMETRY (WILL BE SLOW)!
ERROR[PC_modelmunge msh\t3mod.msh]:NO POLY COUNT FOR t3mod: THIS IS VERY BAD
ERROR[PC_modelmunge msh\t3mod.msh]:NO COLLISION TREE WRITING ALL ZEROES FOR BOUNDING BOX
ERROR[PC_modelmunge msh\t3mod.msh]:Unable to write collision tree nodes, no tree exists
3 Errors 1 Warnings

I had thought that the game created a standard collision geometry for your models when you put them in game (explained by, I thought, the fact that nearly every mesh elicits a "NO COLLISION GEOMETRY" warning when being munged). I was apparently wrong. What is it I should be doing to rectify the above errors?

2586 vertices for a F*ing droid, are you nuts?!?!?!?!
your lil 2 foot nothin droid has more vertices than my entire N-1 model and more than any ship model ive made for this entire game, you need to cut back ALOT, and thats what we were trying to tell you a couple of posts back, your giving everything a USELESS amount of polygons, i could make the very same droid and use only 500 polies which would be around 250 vertices.

minilogoguy18 wrote:2586 vertices for a F*ing droid, are you nuts?!?!?!?!
your lil 2 foot nothin droid has more vertices than my entire N-1 model and more than any ship model ive made for this entire game, you need to cut back ALOT, and thats what we were trying to tell you a couple of posts back, your giving everything a USELESS amount of polygons, i could make the very same droid and use only 500 polies which would be around 250 vertices.

Yeah. No kidding. I get it. Is there any way to get rid of all the extra polies XSI tags on when you convert it to an XSI file? Because it does. Give it a lot of extra polygons, that is. I was more asking about the collision errors, rather than the decidedly obvious TOO MANY POLYGONS, WARNING, DANGER WILL ROBINSON error.

it doesnt give it any extra polies, it just triangulates it and SOMETIMES splits the edges where uv boundaries are (which you can see cause boundary edges are marked light blue) if its anything YOU made the model too high, post a wireframe pic of it so i can see. also another thing, it seems like you just took a bunch of primitive polymeshs and legoed them together to make the model, while this is sometimes an easy way you have to be careful, you need to have cylinders only set to 1 on the base and V plane in the property box that pops up when you create the primitive or else youll start to use polygons that arent needed. so once again LOOK REALLY HARD at the pic i posted a page back showing the cylinder and build yours like that and only add more stacks to cylinders if you need to.

if you don't know how to get lesser polies for a model, I'd suggest you pack your stuffs and quit modelling for games - try with movies instead...

minilogoguy18 wrote:it doesnt give it any extra polies, it just triangulates it and SOMETIMES splits the edges where uv boundaries are (which you can see cause boundary edges are marked light blue) if its anything YOU made the model too high, post a wireframe pic of it so i can see. also another thing, it seems like you just took a bunch of primitive polymeshs and legoed them together to make the model, while this is sometimes an easy way you have to be careful, you need to have cylinders only set to 1 on the base and V plane in the property box that pops up when you create the primitive or else youll start to use polygons that arent needed. so once again LOOK REALLY HARD at the pic i posted a page back showing the cylinder and build yours like that and only add more stacks to cylinders if you need to.

Qdin wrote:if you don't know how to get lesser polies for a model, I'd suggest you pack your stuffs and quit modelling for games - try with movies instead...

Triangulation, not extra polies, got it.

And yes, I can read the big number by "verticies" and the POLY COUNT warning as well as both of you. I'm pretty sure we all made it past 2nd grade. It was my first stab at modeling, and somewhere along the line I made the mistake of smoothing off some edges with Catmull-Clark subdivisions. I also did some unnecessary subdivision adding to make doing things like adding indentations easier. I'm just redoing the model, since it's not all that hard anyway.

I realized that the poly count was too high, but since I'd already successfully brought the model ingame, I thought it was negligible overkill on the polycount. Those errors only appeared after I added the dummyroot and froze all transforms. Ideally, rather than treating me like I'm not paying any attention, someone could explain the question I actually asked, which was:

I wrote:I had thought that the game created a standard collision geometry for your models when you put them in game (explained by, I thought, the fact that nearly every mesh elicits a "NO COLLISION GEOMETRY" warning when being munged). I was apparently wrong. What is it I should be doing to rectify the above errors?

It may simply be to many vertices for it to handle. Once you re-make the model, try exporting it again and see if the same errors come up.