Hi everyone,

I have some fantastic good news for the SWBF modding community. I have spent the last few weeks getting into contact with various developers on the internet to see if they would be interested in creating a tool to convert SWBF mesh files into an editable format. While it has been long possible to use ZeroEditor2 to save MSH files to Wavefront .obj, as you may know all of the UV texture mapping information is lost, as well as any of the object hierarchies. This has made ZE a very impractical solution for 99% of us given how much work would be involved in restoring the model to a usable state.

Well thanks to Zoltan Karpati, we now finally have a way of doing a proper conversion of MSH objects to Wavefront obj (as well as Lightwave3d and other formats) while preserving both UVs and independent object groups. The latest version of Zoltan's program "3d Object Converter" now includes a module for loading MSH files! While modders will still have to use XSI in order to export back to MSH format, I consider this to be an extremely important addition to the tools badly needed by the modding community.

I have some examples of how modders can utilize this great new tool:

- here we have the Tusken Raider mesh, which I've edited out the belt and pouches


- then, switch the head for a generic human head (Obi-Wan in this case). The head and Tusken body can then be reskinned to be used as any robed human character e.g. Chancellor Palpatine or Emperor Palpatine (in red), or a Tatooine denizen, or Bail Organa in senate garb.




- here is a quickly whipped up 327th Star Corps clonetrooper using my reskin, and the ArcTrooper's pauldron and kama:



- it'd be nice to have Aayla Secura as a BF1 unit finally. In the past, her unit has had problems due to extra bones being used for her tentacles (causing her tentacles to become insanely stretched in BF1). But now, she can be reboned without those bones and hopefully appear normal in-game:




- Death Star Princess Leia from BF2 uses the new "cloth" system which BF1 does not support. So here we can add the Tusken Raider's skirt, rescale and tweak it a little to fit her waist, and voila.



- when porting SWBF2 maps to BF1, imp_strikeforce mentioned that it is impossible to distinguish the regular mesh data from the collision mesh. Thanks to 3d object converter, you now get a wavefront object where you can easily isolate the collision mesh by removing the undesirable mesh group:

(Aayla, with her collision primitives highlighted in red)



And then:
(Aayla, with the collision primitives removed)



- in fact, I had the same collision problem when porting the eps3 Jedi Starfighter to BF1 because I couldn't figure out the proper collision meshes to keep and which ones to omit. But now I can see all of them and decide which ones are causing problems (I fixed this last night in fact)



- here's another kitbash: a clonetrooper without his helmet on (I couldn't find a decent texmap of Temura Morrison, so you'll just have to imagine his face instead of Obi's):



And so on. To learn more about Zoltan's impressive tool, you can visit his website here:
http://web.t-online.hu/karpo/

You will note that it costs $50US or 40EURO to register his program. The evaluation version will allow you to load MSHs but not save them in Wavefront or Lightwave until you register. I realize that most of you will probably balk at the thought of spending that much money to simply convert MSH files to OBJ/LWO and probably don't have much use for the other 3d conversions. So I asked Zoltan if he would please consider giving the SWBF community a discount and he has generously agreed.
(EDIT2 (Mar 5 2007): At the request of Zoltan, the discount period has now expired and the discount code is now invalid. It has been removed from my original posting)

The latest version with MSH support is not mentioned on his web page right now, but here is a direct download link you can use:
http://web.t-online.hu/karpo/3dc32390x_dev_20070217.zip

I've already asked and so far there are no plans to support saving MSH files, nor are there plans to support bones and animation. However, I think if enough people show their interest in seeing continued support for SWBF and register their copies, this would certainly help to convince the author that it is worth his time to add more BF functionality to his product.

I am now a registered user myself thanks to Zoltan, so if you have any questions about the conversion or usage, feel free to ask in this thread and I will try to answer them (or you can contact Zoltan through his website)

EDIT1: In case you are having problems, go to the website and download the official release of his tool. Install using the setup program and then copy the files from the zipfile above over your installed files. That's how I did it to get it working.

Man, now I just need XSI to re-envelope the meshes

omfg!!!!!!! That's amazing tean!

PlayerX, you can get a Temura Morrison here: http://jediknight2.filefront.com/file/D ... osVM;55832 . You can unzip the file with WinRAR and inside there'll be the commando skins along with a Temura Morrison face.

This is great news!!!!

Thank you Darth_Z13! I will take a look at this (although is the skin an original creation by the author or just a rip of a texmap from the RC game? I don't want to unintentionally steal someone else's work, even for just a demo)

The pics do really show what this program is all about. Thanks for em' PlayerX. It makes things much easier to see.

Indeed. Those are amazing. Very impressive. I seem to have a problem with opening up my own custom meshes though (not that it matters, but meh). Anyway, once it's been registered and everything, what format would I need to save the mesh as to allow it to be edited in XSI? I noticed a few .OBJ files, but nothing in particular sprang to mind. So what would I need to save it as? Thanks.

omfg!!!!!!! That's amazing tean!

LoL. Take it as a compliment Teancum. Some people are under the impression that you do all the work around here .

Rekubot wrote:Indeed. Those are amazing. Very impressive. I seem to have a problem with opening up my own custom meshes though (not that it matters, but meh). Anyway, once it's been registered and everything, what format would I need to save the mesh as to allow it to be edited in XSI? I noticed a few .OBJ files, but nothing in particular sprang to mind. So what would I need to save it as? Thanks.

omfg!!!!!!! That's amazing tean!

LoL. Take it as a compliment Teancum. Some people are under the impression that you do all the work around here .

Sure, tean gets all the credit but I'm the one who spent three hours trying to whip those up to demonstrate to you guys Life is so unfair...

I don't have XSI myself right now (no room on my HD to install it) but I've been told that it will import the Wavefront obj files (which are what you see in those pictures above... those aren't finished SWBF units in case anyone was wondering, right now I still have to learn XSI and read psychofred's tutorial before I can remotely begin to make those playable)

And again, for those people who can model, please do register and support Zoltan's work. I'd love to see him add MSH save and bones support to his program and the only way to encourage that is to vote with your dollars. He does have the link to this forum so I assume he'll be checking the feedback about how popular this release is and whether he wants to help us out any further than he has already.

Napseeker / PlayerX

PlayerX, thanx for getting us that discount, i jumped right on it when i read that, got my registration key today.
Expect a whole lot of modified units soon.

Umm there was already a thread about this here...

Just by combining units you can get Commander Keller, Obi-Wan as a Clone...

Darth_Z13 wrote:Umm there was already a thread about this here...

Just by combining units you can get Commander Keller, Obi-Wan as a Clone...

What psychofred is talking about, the dev version, is the one that Zoltan actually made at my request (just to clear things up, I'm the one who provided the file specs for the SWBF msh format (and some sample MSH files) to Zoltan and I believe he incorporated that into his planned conversion module for Star Wars Galaxies msh files which he'd been working on for a few months -- however I also took a couple of days to whip up the examples posted in this thread before wanting to make the announcement so psychofred just beat me to it when posting about the new import tool - he kind of stole my thunder about the news oh well, we're all one big community... )

In fred's thread, the other tool that he is talking about (I believe) for capturing 3d data is called 3dRipperDX and can be seen here:
http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm

I posted this info over at SWGC a while back as well, and it seems to work but I'd argue that it's no substitute for Zoltan's program as the results can be quite mixed depending on your circumstance.

Side note: for those of you who aren't interested in registering, remember that 3doc (evaluation version) is still useful as a way to preview MSH objects in your SWBF folder (for those ODF makers, this can be a faster way than guessing which msh to assign to the geometry).

So this is legal, right? It's not like all of those other tools that were discontinued in the past?

Other than that, this is EXTREMELY helpful!

- EP-000782

Other tools? Yes this is a real program that is sold as shareware if that's what you mean, not a hack or a patch of some kind. Check out Zoltan's website for the details, it's a fantastic converter for all sorts of 3d object types.

This is a great tool!

I think I an already hear/smell a tutorial coming soon.....

I'll have to think about registering, but for now, i'll just use it to look at the .MSH files for reference.

My first attempt getting a unit in XSI with all of it's textures using the 3D Object Converter.

B1-Battledroid

Hey Ace, are you planning on releasing any unit packs once you've converted a few of these? Needless to say, my own hope is that the community will get together and add some new unit kitbashes for download -- the reskinning of the new meshes alone should provide a source of new characters for many mods. We need all the boning/enveloping experts to come forward and lead the way

So with this you can import models into XSI? Looks pretty cool. If we convinced the Dev to support .msh saving does that mean that there would be an alternative to XSI?

I think if Zoltan supports saving, then you would at least be able to make props quickly without having to use XSI at all. 3doc, as far as I know, does not support hardpoint saving so you wouldn't be able to make a weapon with a hp_fire hardpoint but in the absence of a hardpoint, I think SWBF uses the default root to fire ordnance from. It wouldn't be hard to support hardpoints in 3doc however, just one feature add that recognizes an object group with the "hp" prefix and the exporter could know to treat it as a valid MSH hardpoint would be all it takes.

Obviously what we'd want to see is the ability to create playable units very easily (although since I'm no expert at bones and enveloping, this may not be such an easy request to fulfill). Who knows though, maybe Zoltan would figure out a smarter way to do it.

ADD: If the ability to save MSH files is an important factor in whether you register or not, email Zoltan and let him know that... it may or may not be too much work for him to add it if it will mean more people will skip XSI and switch to using 3doc instead.

I've never gotten into the modeling factor of Battlefront so what you guys are talking about is confusing. I've downloaded the program and its pretty cool. I can't figure out how to join to different models together though as you did with the Tusken and human head.

You can't do that within 3doc, it's only used for converting the models from one type into another type. You then need a program that would support, say Wavefront obj or Lightwave lwo, which can load the model and then that's where you kitbash (i.e. take pieces from different models and merge them together). There are no 3d modelling programs that let you edit SWBF's native format (MSH) directly, which is why a converter that will convert it to an editable format is such a big development.