Succesfully Editing a body mesh

[svösh]

svösh says: see this thread for a more up to date tutorial. ~tk

 

For my example I extracted: pfbfl.mdl and pfbfl.mdl from KT > Bif’s > player.bif > Aurora Model and the mdx From player.bif > mdx

 

Right now skin mesh is a bit tricky, basically you extract the mdl and mdx of your choice hit read and write in mdlops.

 

Import it in NWNMAX geom. only. When the mesh is in gmax you will see the model is on a base this is the Aurora base and there is triangle pointing to the front just leave it this is the Ngon.

 

So you edit the model in sub objects mode of editable mesh, verts, edges , faces polys. Element

 

By left click + dragging the selection over the vert

Holding ALT will subtract verts from your selection holding Ctrl will add

 

My first step was, I Turned on Edged faces on every view and smooth and highlight.

The way I set mine up was: TOP view port changed to the LEFT view port FRONT in Kotor modeling is BACK but I changed it to RIGHT and used PERSPECTIVE to help with my selection of verts. I moved verts on the X axis back towards the abdomen , in the right or left view port. Then manually tweaking a few verts at the same time. I moved a few verts at a time using the left or right view port to select carefully but do both at the same time.

 

Be careful not to select verts on the back side of the model in some cases it good to check on ignore back

 

Facing in the verts fly out right under the modifier stack. Not in this case the pocket as made up of multiple verts some corners have 4 verts that just look like one.

 

When you get it as flat as you can

Click the editable mesh to exit vertex subobjects

 

Everything is linked up already and ready to export

 

Now click on the base on the right Side panel you will see your options to export the model

 

One is geom.+ anim

One is geom. Only we are using this because the animation is stored elsewhere

 

When you export this model by default it goes to the same directory it was imported from and will overwrite the original ascii mdl so set a new dir to export to I use the meshes folder in gmax. to save my self typing I open the folder in win explorer the copy the address and paste it in gmax saves time and I know it will go to the dir \ I want, ok so no hit export on the right side skin mesh model has a lot of checks to run through as it scans all the weigh points helpers ect.. if all goes well there will be an model in

your meshes directory .

 

Ok now the trickiest part. Rename the freshly exported example:

pfbfl.mdl to pfbfl-ascii.mdl Now copy our

 

original mdl and mdx that you extracted to your meshes dir \ or wherever you exported your edited model to.

 

The reason you have to rename you new model is when you export out of max it’s the same name as your original game one In order to even compile a skin mesh you have to have both the original mdl and mdx in the same dir \ now open up mdlops un check the box if it’s set to convert skin mesh to trimesh brows to your pfbfl ascii-.mdl hit read and write I always switch to the dos window to see the progress if everything is successful then the model will compile and you will have 2 new files PFBFL-ascii-bin.mdl, PFBFL-ascii-bin.mdx

 

Copy these to your override dir new rename them by removing the -ascii-bin so the names will be simply PFBFL.mdl and PFBFL.mdx

 

Fire up you game cross your fingers and if you are lucky like me you will get something like this.

 

http://svoshsphotos.fotopic.net/p7563940.html http://svoshsphotos.fotopic.net/p7563941.html

 

I hope you are successful in your skin mesh editing as well

 

svösh