harleyquin Posted June 19, 2003 Share Posted June 19, 2003 Hi. I have several character models I have done and skinned using Milkshake. I have exported them to 3dsMax and merged it with a weighed and tagged Skellington found on Psykopats tutorial. I have tried to read through the various tutorials out there but I am not experienced on 3ds Max and all the tutorials are wrote around you knowing how to use it... so I'm getting horribly lost. What I could do with is a HUGE favour... Either somebody who's willing to spend a few hours on MSN messenger talking me through the process (have 3ds Max 4.2) to talk me through associating the weighed skell to the various model bits, then the UV Mapping thing, Then finally throwing it all through Assimilate for th final product. After this I will write a document on how to do all that but wrote in a way that people new to Max can understand.. well basically one where you build the model in milkshape right way though to geting a working JK model. To this document I will credit anybody who is willing to help, and ensure they get all the kudos they deserve. or ... Somebody to take the various models I do then weigh, tag and map etc to make them work and I will skin the UV Maps. This would be a good modelling partnership that can run into JK3 if anybody is interested? I realise you all must get a lot of Posts here about this, so I apologise to all of you who have read this a thousand times before, but I do appreciate any help I can get here. Thanks for taking the time to read my post. Hazel Xxxxx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psynex Posted June 19, 2003 Share Posted June 19, 2003 hmmm....you've seemed to make it that far. Are you familiar with the modifier stack? That's key to using any version of Max. I can try and help you here, but am at work and I don't use MSN here or at home. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hindy Posted June 19, 2003 Share Posted June 19, 2003 I say just do it... I didnt know anything about Max before doing my first player model. Just do it yourself and post a question when you run into bother. Its beneficial to learn yourself me thinks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harleyquin Posted June 20, 2003 Author Share Posted June 20, 2003 ....... ok..... so basically ask for help get told to do it myself. ok...... Well ok.. first issue.. think I got the weighing thing done, now I have a losd of materials I did through milkshape and assigned then to areas of the model. Now when throwuing it through assimilate getting error that I need the inages in the local path. Now I've tried the obvious of copying the jpg's to where I'm throwing the XSI through assilimate but this does not help... so where in max can I get a list of the materials I have used so that I can re-point them to a more local path??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infinity Blade Posted June 21, 2003 Share Posted June 21, 2003 Well, rather a simple solution to that one! Here's a pic of the XSI exporter box.... XSI Exporter Window I marked the area the sets the filepath for the textures In the big red circle. It takes out all the path before the text listed, soooo.. If you had your textures set up for: C:/myjostuff/wip/models/players/MycoolModel/texture.tga It would be cut to: /models/players/MycoolModel/texture.tga Have your textures in a folder, presumably like models/players/modelname/texture.tga ... Of course replacing modelname with whatever the name of your model is, the same with texture.tga.... Then you use the material editor, bring up those textures, slap em on your model, export using what I've shown in the pic, and Taa DAA! I don't know if it's exactly the most correct way, but At least it works for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harleyquin Posted June 21, 2003 Author Share Posted June 21, 2003 THNXXX, sorted that one OK... next problem Model has 60 surfaces, but only 1 can be reached by recursing from surface 0 ('stupidtriangle_off') You need to re-hierarchy this model correctly, These are the surface(s) not reachable from Surface 0... *r_arm_elbow *r_arm_cap_torso bla bla bla Ok.. makes NO sence to me... I'm slopwly getting the gist of max, but images such as Infinity Blade provided are invaluble to us know nothings any more ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harleyquin Posted June 21, 2003 Author Share Posted June 21, 2003 thats from assimilate btw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Infinity Blade Posted June 21, 2003 Share Posted June 21, 2003 Alright... this sounds like you haven't linked your tags and such up... The way the model's hierarchy should be set up is in Tim Appleby's tutorial that was included in the JO tools pack.... If you know how to link the parts together, and know about the hierarchy, then just go over it and make sure you didn't link something incorrectly, or forgot to go through the stupidtriangle...... If you need to know about linking and such though, I'll give you a quick guide... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Psyk0Sith Posted June 21, 2003 Share Posted June 21, 2003 hey harleyquin! Infinity Blade is right, it is a hierarchy linking issue: There's a script plugin called autolink for 3d max, that'll link all the STANDARD hierarchy together (you need to manually link additional surfaces like "head_goggles" for example). the autolink script I suppose you checked out my website...if not then you should, i think its a good place to start. http://www3.sympatico.ca/psykopat Hope this helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harleyquin Posted June 21, 2003 Author Share Posted June 21, 2003 OK... thought I'd linked them up.... but then not sure as I feel like I'm swimming in the dark. OK, went through the tutorials. added the bones in the places it said , grabed the gizmo and expanded them so all the points highlighted. Made sure that all the sections where covered. Do I have to link the bones together??? like Cranium to Cervical??? if so how.. dosent say. Also the hands.. used Lhand and Rhand when trying to weigh hands was that right???? on the tutorial is simply says "You must also weight all the tags on your model to bones too. Very simple to do but annoying I know" .. it actually dosent say how to do this... Now I've used the weighed skell found on Psyco's site.. so am I ok in assuomint that this part of the weighing is done??? OK.. I used - Head : Cranium, Cervical Face : Cranium Torso: lclavical, rclavical, Thorac, Upper_lumbar, Lower Lumbar Left Hand: lhand Right Hand: rhand Ledt arm: lhumerusx, lhumerus, lradius, lradiusx Right arem, rhumerusx, rhumerus, rradius, rradiusx Hips: pelvis, lefmurx, lfemurYZ, rfemurX, rfemurYZ Left leg: ltibia Left Foot:ltalus,ltarsil Right Leg: rtibia Right Foot:rtalus,rtarsil now I know the hands in the tutorial didnt show the l or rhand thing but it complained about missing weights the first time I tried. I can e-mail the model out to anybody to review what I done and tell me where I'm wrong. Hazel xx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CortoCG Posted June 30, 2003 Share Posted June 30, 2003 I've been reading the thread for a while, and sphychosith and IB are the right persons to consult. But I think you're going slightly mad bcuz you're not going step by step. You shoud take it easy, take a deep breath, and go thru the linking rigging process step by step checking that each part is correctly linked or weighted. Here are some tips and tricks: -Before linking or weighting the model you should select all the surfaces and reset it's XForm, or you'll regret it when you find out that after exporting to dotXSI several bits of your model are out of place. Check the 3ds Max documentation to see how to Reset XForm. After aplying the modifier, you'll say -nothing happened!-, exactly, everything should look in the same place they where before resetting XForm. Just collapse every modifier on the stack for each surface and you're done with that. No flying around bits when exporting to dotXSI. Remember to unlink every surface before doing this, or you'll regret it too. -Link every surface from children to parent until you reach the mesh_root dummy, that's the parent of the whole mesh. -If you move the mesh root you'll figure wich surfaces are not linked, cause most of them will follow the mesh root except for those orphan surfaces. -If you're not sure if some surface follows has the correct parent you should move the every surface from parent to child from 'mesh_root' to the last surface on the chain. For example: 'mesh_root' is the parent of all surfaces, the next one is 'stupidtriangle_off', the next one is 'hips', and so on... If you move an arm and the head moves, there's something definitebly wrong . -Even when Tim Appleby's tutorial says to rig the model by pushing and pulling handles and gizmos, I think it's not the most effective and fastest way. The most effective is to manually weight them by painting them, but it's very very slow. The other one, as effective as manually painting them but the fastest, is to select vertices and bake them an absolute weight to them. I don't know if that's possible in max 4.2, but all you have to do is to select vertices with the selection marquee and then enter a value into the Abs. Effect or Weight (I cannot remember the exact name of it). -If you downloaded the tagged skeleton from PhyschoSith website you should touch the skeleton hierarchy, only re-link the tags to the main surfaces of your model (and I think they're already weighted to the right bone and all). -If you move the skeleton root you'll figure which vertices are not weighted at all, cause most of the mesh will move except for those orphan vertices. -You can name the surfaces as you most like them. For ex., my dark trooper phase 1's surfaces are called like this: dt1_eyes dt1_head dt1_torso dt1_shoulder_pads dt1_l_arm dt1_r_arm dt1_l_forearm dt1_r_forearm dt1_l_fists dt1_r_fists dt1_hips dt1_l_leg dt1_r_leg dt1_l_lowerleg dt1_r_lowerleg dt1_l_foot dt1_r_foot And it works fine, you can download it at my forums on http://www.cortocg.com. -You can even delete the caps and the caps' tags if you're not using dismemberment, but is not advisable, cuz many ppl use hat feature. -You can delete all the bones that are not participating in the rigging process. For ex., I have a simplified skeleton, with no _eff bones, no fingers, no face bones, and no motion bone, just kept the r_hang bone cause a tag is weighted to it. -Bones can be nulls or dummies if you like, as long as you name them corectly and link them correctly. Perhaps I'm forgetting about something, but you'll find out . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CortoCG Posted June 30, 2003 Share Posted June 30, 2003 Weight the surfaces to the bones you believe are right, that's common sense. I mean, I don't think you'll assign the lhand bone to the r_foot . That's all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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