[3DS] Collision: the easy way out using gundalf's exporter

[gundalf]

Hmm the culprit is again NvTriStrip, the other stripper fails too, though. I'm too tired to fix this now, but it looks like I have to write my own

EDIT: as a workaround you can delete the faces and recreate them.
EDIT2: this is a .obj import, right?
EDIT3: if it is, could you send me the .obj?

[Razorwing]

I'm sorry if you missed my Edit gundalf
I found out that if, on the exact same model, I didn't weld the meshes together, then the normals weren't flipped on that polygon.

I might have another problem though. Instead of facemapping this border texture I cut it up into individual polygons and planar-mapped each polygon. It looks fine in Max, or at least it looks like intended, but they've been flipped on the exported model.

Is it because I used a rotation on the map in the material editor? Strange if that's the case because I haven't had that problem with rotated textures before.

Edit: For a spot of good news though I've added collision to Caligula's hut interior and this time there was a proper collision mesh (following the XForm problem of the exterior) - and the apple bounced merrily on the floor

[gundalf]

Originally posted by Razorwing
I'm sorry if you missed my Edit gundalf
I found out that if, on the exact same model, I didn't weld the meshes together, then the normals weren't flipped on that polygon.

Hmm interesting. Should work, though.

Originally posted by Razorwing
I might have another problem though. Instead of facemapping this border texture I cut it up into individual polygons and planar-mapped each polygon. It looks fine in Max, or at least it looks like intended, but they've been flipped on the exported model.

Is it because I used a rotation on the map in the material editor? Strange if that's the case because I haven't had that problem with rotated textures before.

Can you send me the scene, please? I think the rotation COULD be the problem, but you get a collapsed mesh from max to export. At this stage it's only mapping coordinates....

Originally posted by Razorwing
Edit: For a spot of good news though I've added collision to Caligula's hut interior and this time there was a proper collision mesh (following the XForm problem of the exterior) - and the apple bounced merrily on the floor

Hmm I'm going to do the XForm in the exporter in a future version, so you won't have to do that manually. Don't be scared by all the problems. I have expected this, that's why I released it so early: to find all the issues. In retrospect I should probably have done a closed alpha test release, but I like to keep it with SourceForge's motto: Release early, release often, since I believe in open development. Anyway, thanks for finding these little beasts...

[Razorwing]

Np I'm happy to testpilot your creation and perhaps my bug reports can be of some use. The ones not caused from my own blunders, at least

Here's the last max scene I have with the planar mapped polys. I've set it up so that the planar-mapped collection can be easily merged to a future version if I want to try and use them again. In the current version of the interior I skipped them, in favor of just merging them together and use a tiled square texture over all of them instead. That part works.

Oh and in case anyone wonders, I don't think the fuzziness sometimes seen in CS screenshots is an error. It's the CS that blurs them at longer viewing distances. As you zoom in they become clearer and I bet they do in-game too. It's been a week since I used the game in any way, so I should really do that soon.

[gundalf]

I found out what the problem is: the u/v coordinates are actually v/u coordinates. Now I have to figure out how to detect it. The Max sdk documentation is a dense and creepy jungle...
:chaos:

[Razorwing]

Aah, I see. I'm keeping my fingers crossed you find the answer. :goodjob:

[gundalf]

Is it because I used a rotation on the map in the material editor? Strange if that's the case because I haven't had that problem with rotated textures before.

I misread this as "rotated in the uvwmap modifier". :bash: No wonder the texture ends up like this. You have to apply these kinds of transforms manually...

*goes and implements it*

EDIT: fixed. :dance:

[gundalf]

RW: could you please send me the unwelded max scene and the .obj for the door? Merging the objects shouldn't cause problems, I'd like to find out what went wrong. TIA.

EDIT: it seems Max's scripting language supports all that is needed to write a script which converts a bunch of .max files to .nif. Sounds useful to you? Mass conversion from .nif to .max could also be done once the import plugin is finished...

[gundalf]

Here's a new build of the exporter. It (hopefully) fixes the holes which sometimes appeared in the collision meshes. It also exports meshes without uv coordinates...

[Razorwing]

gundalf:
1. Aah, kk. I usually rotate the texture in the material editor instead of in the uvw map modifier because I feel the former gives me better control of how it's mapped. I mean I know how the texture in the file looks so it's easy to rotate it in my mind and figure out which degree it should be rotated to in the material editor. I'll test out the new version of your plugin and see if it works this time.

2a. Sure, np, I've attached the files. The max scene has the same version of the door as the nif file does. I think that if you weld the vertices on the door, apart from the collision mesh, in the Max scene and export it with the second version of your plugin (the second one you posted on sourceforge), the error with the flipped-normal-polygon should be reproduce-able. I wasn't sure what obj you were referring to so I included the nif file too, that way you could export it either from the max scene or nif file depending on which kind of obj you wanted.

2b. Not to me personally, no. But the other way around would be very handy, if it's able to convert Morrowind NIFs =) Because I've been using NifSkope do that, exporting all the obj meshes, but particularly with community-made nifs the positions of the meshes usually get corrupted. So if I try to bring in say the outhouse model from our TES3 mod it comes in in twenty pieces all jumbled up. If your plugin can eventually import old and new NIFs flawlessly that would be most useful to me, and surely others too.

3. Perfect, thanks