Custom Player Models

[ksk h2o]

Okay my search did not bring much results on this, and since the forums have been very quiet I hope I'll be able to get some info/feedback.

 

I'm currently working on transforming my old grayfox for jedi outcast model into jedi academy.

 

besides the standard and boring re wieghing and re-fitting of the new tags and skeleton, I wanted to be a little creative and make this into a worthwhile download. I made 3 sword type (not lightsaber, real sword) weapons (katanas actually) that have a few neat extra features and effect on the character and got them working right in game. Now I wanted to expand the character model into a custom character with various torso's, legs heads etc.

 

Long story short, I'm modelling a few characters based on slight body and accesory variations of the basic grayfox model. I guess I could release them as seperate models but hey... they are so similar in build that they really wouldn't qualify as different models. Plus the possibility of mixing and matching torso's heads and legs seem a pretty neat concept.

 

I took a look at the jedi_hm model in modview and I think I understand the basics. I'm to add an a,b,c to the end of the mesh name (torsoa, torsob, l_arma, l_armb) if I'm not mistaken.

 

My question is about the hierarchy of this model.

Do all the a,b,c, meshes link into each other in their own tree or do each torso, leg, arm link as seperate branches in one big hierarchy... I don't know if this made any sense to anyone but me.

 

thanks

[keshire]

It's really all about how you want to arrange it. Whatever is most organized for you. You can put all the a,b,c's under one branch.

 

ie:

l_arma

l_armb

..l_handa

..l_handb

..l_handc

 

or

 

r_arma

..r_handa

r_armb

..r_handb

 

 

In fact you don't even need to use the a,b,c. I suppose it was done this way because of the amount of meshes involved.

 

all the dividing up is done via the skin files. Which again doesn't need the a,b, or c.

 

I put up a quick model called the yavin bush man on lucasfiles, you can take a look at. To see how I did it.

[ksk h2o]

Thanks for the info. I've been duplicating the raven custom model hierarchy to be on the safe side, yet it is getting quickly out of hand as the number of body meshes increases.

 

It seems that the stupidtriangle from Outcast is gone in JA. I basically duplicated the old setup id triangle and renamed them torso_off head_off and hips_off and made them the root branch where the alternates link to. (raven style)

 

One thing I see though which might make this thing a heck of a lot seasier is that the tags don't seem to be linked to their corresponding body type but all linked to the root mesh (hips_off) in my case. A change from outcast for me since I used to link the corresponding bolts to their body meshes.