Evening all,

you've probably seen the odd post from me about the 3D side of modding over here for the past few months, and for the most of it, its been a learning curve and I've gotten gradually used to it.

Now I've gotten myself into a bit of a pickle, and I'm about ready to either kill someone, or set fire to my face

A few questions I'm desperate to get some assistance with if you wouldn't mind you ingenius people you;

1) Collision Models in 3DS Max 2010 - having followed SaidenStorms wicked and thoroughly indepth tutorial, I am at a complete loss for how to actually nail up a collision model for my fairly generic static ingame models. Any form of walkthrough help would be drastically appreciated to the point of me finding your address, buying a plane ticket and/or filling up the car with petrol and alcohol/tea/juice, coming over and kissing your feet.

2) Animations - strictly a simple transformation animation, dead simple, a set of cylinders moving up and down... nothing to it. Same as above though, ready to commit suicide over complete lack of direction.

3) Textures:- please see link and advise, I thought I'd solved it earlier by creating a texture set in the GECK with the mesh's assigned texture, then replacing all the texture groups on the Base model 'in-geck' akin to clothing re-textures. It seemed to look okay, until I switched cells out-of-game and poof, back to silly old 'dark tinted' style. The 4 kit pieces are all different meshes, and look exactly the same before they're dropped into a cell, so I'm at an absolute sod loss. I've even tried dabbling with lighting and the cell's base lighting template, and nada. As you can see in the first pic, looking at the kitpiece from one angle is fine. Turning a smidge to the left throws it out of colour.

http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/4391/help1a.jpg

http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/8436/help2t.jpg

So yes, any help, anything at all (not that I'm begging, but I am, let's face it) would be gratified enormously. No doubt I've not mentioned something of massive importance.

Kris

I am just wonder how are you importing the max file there isn't a nif exporter, are you converting it to obj. I do not know much about max, but I do know about the animations, you need to export the animation as a kf and then attach it in nifskope.

Sorry, sure, meant to say I'm exporting it using an old Niftools Exporter.

do you know if the exporter can handle kf file, and im not sure about your problem with the texture, have you tried entering the cell again and see if the texture changed. I am not sure about how to make collision for 3ds max, but I do know blender, so if you export as obj and them import it in blender, then you just have to duplicate you model and go under modifiers and hit decimate then you can just export the entire thing as a nif.

Ok, i recently got the Autodesk 3D studio max 2010, i havent used it yet though, also, for the textures, if you use fallout 3 mod manager, try the button that says, "Toggle Invalidation" i forget the reason for this, my meshes and textures would always take the textures from other files until i pressed that button


Hope It Works

Thanks Aaron1178

Hi guys, thanks for your suggestions. I may definitely try the blender suggestion if I can get my head around a completely new piece of software. As for the Arch Inval, it wont be this as I've already got it validated (had issues last year with textures and this seems to be something to do with the lighting).

Well Blender seems to be completely confuddling me... it's a helluva different system to 3DS Max isn't it?!

Essentially, 3DS Max 2010, is that dodgy ground to be working on? Is it worth me downgrading to say 2009 so I can use the more legit niftools utility for it?

Right, what Ive done in Max 2010 is thus...

Cloned my mesh,
the clone COLL,
hidden the base mesh,
created a BHKRigidBody using NifTools,
attached the COLL mesh to it as the collision mesh
In export changed root node type to BSFadeNode
Then opened it up in nifskope. I can see my red meshed collision model around the mesh, but Im stuck as to how to copy those branches across to an existing .nif file.

Any ideas?

I have no idea what you are asking. I use 2009, but the plugin does work for 2010... so i am told, yes people do use it. correctly. I have talked to them and they get exports. I use the latest dev release. found via the niftools forum.

collision. i use a method based on saiden's tutorial. i have done away with linking stuff together and i don't export with Extra Nodes on Mesh. I think that's about all i do differently. Works for me. < I have dozens of released meshes.

the animation sounds simple. I don't know what you are having difficulty with specifically. Scene set up? export? post process? this could be hand keyed in nifskope easily enough. or you could use a combination of set up in nifskope, and importing a kf- so the controller sequence is exactly what you animated in max. anyway it is song and dance to get it to work in F3.

textures issue- dunno need to see files.

forget copy pasta. you'll end up doing enough nifskopery just to get your animations working, no need to add more that you don't have to.

blender trys to be awkward, basically alienates people because they way it does stuff is weird. nothing like Maya, Max, XSI, milkshape, anything I have tried really. all of which you can more quickly adapt to doing stuff. I remember trying to do sothing in blender for 8 hours... and managed to do in other programs within half and hour. I lost all interest at that point.

Well thats some comfort at least that the method Im approaching is viable.

My issue at the moment isnt necessarily the exporting, it's the nifskope part. Now my understanding of mesh importing is that you need a 'base object' to copy your nitristripsdata over from your exported mesh. This always seems to work fine.

Now collision wise, Im getting the export settings okay, its opening in nifskope and I can see the red wireframe of my coll model surrounding my base object.

My problem at the mo is how do I move this collision model across from that .nif to the base .nif in my Data/meshes folder?

Still not really any closer to fathoming this ruddy collision model mystery.

The below screenies are of my exported model with colMesh from 3DS Max 2010 as stated above, and the following image is the base model from my data directory that I need to transfer the data across to.

I'm getting completely befuddled as to how to get the exported collision data across to the Base model.

http://img814.imageshack.us/i/nifskopecolmeshed.jpg/

http://img227.imageshack.us/i/nifskopebasemodel.jpg/

Cheers guys, I'm not being very descriptive, but the crux of it is Im just having a very difficult time getting my head around collision modelling, be it by following SaidenStorms tutorials or via the Elderscrolls wiki tutorial.

you do not need to do this.


you do this exactly like any block copying and pasting
if you must:

open both nifs

right click the rigidbody>copy branch>

right click the scene root of the recipient nif>paste branch

in the block details of the scene root, add that block to be the collision shape

I think I get what youre saying... only problem is, with the recipient nif, there is no scene root... :S Sorry, not being very receptive here am I :S

well there has to be a root node(it is not always named scene root)... or else it'll just be a completely blank nif(or an invalide one the game won't read). even in that case just click the empty space in block list, block>insert>ninode... i don't think that is what you mean.

if the root nodes aren't named the same will probably run into the failed to map parent link error, just rename the root node to match one or the other, either way works.

Ach - now I'm completely lost, how useless am I?! I don't suppose you'd take a look at the .nif's for me if I pop them up would you? Been at this since 9pm now, and it's just about to go 2am lol...

http://www.mediafire.com/?ke9k1fyr2rx6880

http://www.mediafire.com/?1mpqctoyq6dhppn

I know I've cocked it up drastically somewhere...

it looks like you have exported with flipped normals- this could explain all manner of issues you are having with the mesh. open your exported mesh in nifskope- render>settings> untick the textures in that render box at the bottom left. notice that the mesh is dark... that isn't vertex colors.. it should be white. notice the box06 tristrip has exported correctly. < except you forgot to add a texture to it at export, so you have no shader and texture nodes for it.

Also note you have entirely removed all face smoothing from a lot of the mesh> you shouldn't have everything split like that imo. set up some smooth groups.

you have much weird topology on those 6 strip pieces that encase the bulb bit.. i'd remove that and make it tidy. It is causing unnecessary shading errors
you probably have 600 or more tri being wasted on those 5 little cones..

go back to your max scene- do this individually for each object you are going to export- select it> reset xform. once that is done select them all, right click> convert to editable poly.
flip anything that's now inverted, I use the normal modifier.

remove all that weird/clean up/optimize topology.

set up smooth groups.

now I know i said you could use a copy of your mesh as a collision shape... I said that so you could understand that you can use anything..so at 7800tri... i think that is quite excessive. i would make a collision shape reducing that to probably much less than 1k tri.

there is no point going further setting up nifs until you make it ready. you just have to end up exporting it all again to fix errors.


so once that is done, reexport. just use the same settings(but have update tangent space ticked on the export dialog)- that nif will work in game by tweaking 3 things. to make your final nif, i think it would be better to use your exported nif, and just copy over the anim from the base nif.

edit: oh yeah- you alpha is never going to work they way you are exporting it. you will have to get-
a ) set up vertex order so it may have a chance of rendering without sorting issues
B ) export a second version of your nif but as NiTriShapes and not strips, which will fubar alpha more often than not
c ) get lucky

and make sure you are using the latest dev release for the niftools plugin- i haven't found any real show stopper issues with it, and that one will likely have the best support for F3 and 2010

Cheers buddy... I'll start to whimper... now. I think I get what you're saying. Some of it makes sense anyway.

I've followed your steps and gotten to this point;

http://www.mediafire.com/?j12tl8k4wbs83ys

http://www.mediafire.com/?ufg7oh406dpi23k

i don't have max 2010 so that scene likely will not open for me.

now you have inverted the faces on the box06 tristrip. select that object and flip the normals just on that.

and you still have exported a couple shapes without textures in its material, this is why it doesn't have the correct blocks to add textures to it

i think the collision leave much to desired. I'm not convinced of the face smoothing setup, and the mesh still has some shading issues due to that and dodgy topology

export it as a obj and i'll set it up for you.

Ohhh cheers buddy... you're a full on life saver. I think it's a learning curve I should really invest a heck of a lot of time in... I was never really any good in 3D at Uni...

http://www.mediafire.com/?a14yzssct5462z5

http://www.mediafire.com/?rbpmizimovl0xii