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I made a new weapon mesh, a plasma sword/rifle, and I tried to hex-edit it to allow the blade to be semi-transparent (Found 4th place over from ATRB and hexed a "04" in). I did this for both the main one and the one with the blade's texture right after it. In-game, it shows up white, as if the texture is missing. What is wrong?

It's not necessarily that you hexed wrong- It could be something like the texture was the wrong size (I've done that, 246x246) or it could just be a problem with export. What Frag told me to do to fix this was select all of the object's polys, right click, and select "Extract Polygons-Delete" and then export.

Did you add an alpha channel to the texture?

The texture has a shipped, stock alpha.

I just realized, I did hex wrong. Fancy that.

Fiodis wrote:(Found 4th place over from ATRB and hexed a "04" in).

Ought to have been 5th place over.

Well, then, another question before this can be locked: can weapon meshes scroll and have glow and transparency, all at the same time?

They can have two at once for sure, dunno about all three, although I believe that VF did that for the Energy Sword model.

you can only add one flag per polygon/material but transparency isnt a flag

DarthD.U.C.K. wrote:you can only add one flag per polygon/material b8t transparency isnt a flag

I have no idea what that means, unfortunately. I can only have transparency? All I do is hex-edit in numbers that do stuff. Are those numbers what you call flags? And what's a b8t?

EDIT - Seems you can't do all three, since where you'd have to hex in scrolling is the same place as glow, so it seems you ought to pick one or the other.

ok, my explanation was not that understandable
for every material/polygon you can define one "flag" like scroll, glow bumpmap, specularmap, glossmap, throbb, reflections, envmap etc but you can only define one flag per poly/material and transparency is not a flag, that why you can make things transparent but envmapped for example

b8t is a typo i meant but

DarthD.U.C.K. wrote:ok, my explanation was not that understandable
for every material/polygon you can define one "flag" like scroll, glow bumpmap, specularmap, glossmap, throbb, reflections, envmap etc but you can only define one flag per poly/material and transparency is not a flag, that why you can make things transparent but envmapped for example

b8t is a typo i meant but

Ah, that makes it a lot clearer and increases my understanding of how .msh files are arranged.

And I thought "b8t" meant "byte", which is what had me confused.

Well, this can be locked, my questions answered. Thanks!

EDIT - Hang on, don't lock this yet; another hexing question popped up, and it'd seem noobish to create a whole new thread.

I hexed in a "01" the 6th place after ATRB, to enable glow, but no apparent glow appears. Is there something else that I need to hex in, an intensity value or anything? Or is the texture missing something?

I don't reccomend hexing glow. And did you remember the msh.option?

For the Covenant Energy Sword I did, I have it Flagged for Scrolling, and used the trick Culvar came up with for glow, by using a custom saber texture and adjusting blade lengths and widths to match it to my sword.

If you want to try it, make a duplicate of your part you want to flag, and flag each on separately and shrink one so its slightly smaller to avoid z-fighting.

VF501 wrote:For the Covenant Energy Sword I did, I have it Flagged for Scrolling, and used the trick Culvar came up with for glow, by using a custom saber texture and adjusting blade lengths and widths to match it to my sword.

If you want to try it, make a duplicate of your part you want to flag, and flag each on separately and shrink one so its slightly smaller to avoid z-fighting.

The first wouldn't work since it's a rifle mesh. The second I'll have to try. Woudn't the stationary, glowing one show up under the non-glowing, transparent, scrolling top one? And how do you set glow intensity? I believe it's based on the texture, but I'm just making sure.

Here is a picture with a scrolling transparent texture with a glow mesh in the middle.
The glow mesh is the scrolling polygons extracted and scaled down and flag set to glow.
There is other geometry in the middle of the weapon that is why the glow mesh is as big as it is but depending upon your model you might be able to get with rather small gometry and it wouldn't be as obvious.



Sorry can't show you any more than that, not my weapon and not sure if the creator has made it public yet.

But for the glow you do need to do a color at vertices map and paint the polies the glow color you want.

FragMe! wrote:But for the glow you do need to do a color at vertices map and paint the polies the glow color you want.

Could you explain this a bit? Is it some XSI feature, or can it be done with GIMP? And what's a vertices map?

Color at Vertices map is a XSI thing, it is found under render/create/properties menus.
XSI has help for it that can explain it better than I can here. But basically you paint the polygons for the parts you want to glow. You can set what color they should glow as well.
There is also a thing in the FAQ for glow which also covers vertex coloring.

As for hex editing it in, since I don't do hex editing I am making some assumtions, but if they parts are different meshes within the model then you should be able to get to the bits separately to edit them.

FragMe! wrote:Color at Vertices map is a XSI thing, it is found under render/create/properties menus.
XSI has help for it that can explain it better than I can here. But basically you paint the polygons for the parts you want to glow. You can set what color they should glow as well.
There is also a thing in the FAQ for glow which also covers vertex coloring.

As for hex editing it in, since I don't do hex editing I am making some assumtions, but if they parts are different meshes within the model then you should be able to get to the bits separately to edit them.

The gun is a sword/barrel combo, the sword blade is a seperate little mesh within the model, that's what I've hexed to glow. If I do this Color at Vertices thing, will it export correctly with MshEx or will I have to ask someone to do it?