I am not much experienced in this, but I guess, it's second way, because hierarchy is overhuge, and content many mshes and bones.
By the way, I just import & export IFT tank, it works fine, except a little problem: it has no shadow at all!

Shadow meshes are 'encoded' differently to standard meshes. tirpider figured it out mostly but compared to the normal format shadow meshes are really complex. As it's possible to export shadows by using 'sv' I didn't implement that yet. The IFT most likely had a shadow mesh, which gets imported as null and thus you don't have a shadow if you reexport it.
I'll take a look at the dwarf spider sometime.

I wouldn't say they're complex at all, shadows work just fine using the sv_ prefix, read the documentation sereja2.

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the shadow volume chunks or whatever you wanna call them, but yeah, no, shadow volume meshes are so incredibly easy to create.

Yep. the SHDW shadows as opposed to the sv_ shadow volume mesh.
They are based around edge indexes instead of vertexes and triangle strips.
Goofy little things.

As a side note, can sv_ meshes be used in vehicles instead of the SHDW?
That would simplify the whole thing by making it go the way of NDXL and NDXT.

I just try to export IFT, with sv_ chunks. It works, but unfortunately, it seems, I can export only 1 sv_ chunk per model. When I create sv_ for body, it works, but when I also create sv_ for ski, the shadow of the body is gone, and left only for ski.

So...why not just merge the two shadow volume meshes? If things are animated, then you can just envelope them to bones.

Hmm... I didn't try envelope something yet, except door, but I guess, I found more easy way: I just copy lowrez, and call it: sv_main.

I made a simple model, but I cant figure out how to texture it using Ze tools. So, how do I texture a model? Thanks!

I do not think, you may add textures, by ZETool. I guess, it can manage only already exist materials. Still maybe my way help you:

sereja2 wrote:And here the way, how I am usualy add materials to models:
Material>Phong>Color(some wench tool icon)>Image>(Image) New>New From File>Scene_Material.tga (or something else, choose tga from the list in Pictures folder)>(Texture Projection) New>(choose projection)

By the way, the "leg bug", from dwarf spider, happens, in infantry models, after I export them.

@sereja: Do these bugs happen to units you enveloped or to units you imported and then exported again?

The "leg bug" happens with imported, and then exported again models, of'course. I just have not enough knowlege, to envelope them by myself, or I cud start create my own custom animated units .

Post pics of the parts that get messed up in the Explorer view with the settings All Except Params selected (default) and the mesh nodes expanded to see if there are any operators that can be messing the model up. Something as simple as a center operator can cause things like this, or just an improper local transform which should always be 0,0,0.

I think I fixed it. The Weld Boundary Edge operator changed the topology before I applied the weights. Now the op gets applied after everything is done (unless you check the Weld option in the settings tab).
Props should be visible now, too. The alpha is now always 1.0, not dependent on what XSI returns.

r2 is up in a sec.

Ugh, so I can export animations, but I can't seem to munge them. (I've munged tons and tons of animations in the past.)
I get this problem no matter which animation exported using your Tools I attempt to munge, not even stock anims imported and then re-exported using your tools. I get no errors upon export or anything. The anim's MSH is called heavypistol_rifle_stand_reload_upper.msh.

Oh, and the rest of the Tools seems to work perfectly!

The CRC tool I use seems to output wrong CRCs which don't exist in the skeleton. Could you quickly check the names of every bone of one of your animations in XSI and see if any of them is named incorrectly?
Either the importer names bones incorrectly and that makes the CRC tool calculate wrong CRCs or the CRC tool does not work 100%. If the latter is the case I (most likely) can't fix it as I don't have access to the source.
Maybe I can find a workaround though.

if the crc tool is broken or unreliable, we could collect the crc's from existing animations and models, match them up with thier corresponding bone_names.

New animations and models would have to draw from that list for names.

Deffinatly a kludgy workaround, and limits what the modeler can name things, but if it works...

For new animations it worked fine.
That means that it actually doesn't output wrong CRCs. If that were the case no custom animations would work.
Must be something else then. Maybe wrong naming by the importer. Or some problem with lowercase/uppercase. OR a problem with my exporter exporting too many bones?

Marth could you send the animation .msh over? Then I can take a look at the bones.

Sure: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/38430663/Mass% ... _upper.msh

I'm sorry if I am interjecting. This topic interests me, though.

I checked out your msh structure and the only odd thing I can see in it is the "GroundDummy" null.

Everything else looks fine.

I removed it and DummyRoot's parent link to it, but I can't really test it out.

Here it is if you want to try it.

-edit... oh gosh...
The above may not work. I found a different odd thing.
The BLN2 and SKL2 have all 50 of the nulls crc'd.
And the KFR3 has entries for all 50.
Normally it's just the envelope nulls.