Doom3world

I'm busy going through Dick Dastardly's skinning tutorial and have hit a snag.

He uses 3dsmax and the Texporter plugin.
The Texporter plugin doesn't work with Gmax.

Is there any plugins for gmax that do a similar thing ?

nothing that works 100%, no. To be honest your best bet is to do it with the tools and methods with in GMax, it's seems complex now but once you get into it it's actually quite flexable.

What bit are you actually stuck on?? (how far have you got??)

you seriuosly need to get a real copy of 3d studio

i dont know if the current version of gmax uses the max 4 or 5 unwrapper but i will tell you that the max 5 unwrapper is seriuosly light years ahead of max 4s unwrapper. Also there is a texture script THAT YOU NEED! its called http://www.scriptspot.com/scripts/web_u ... lsV1_1.zip

This script allows you to grab a unwrapped face of one polygon and then cope the uVs and texture then paste that onto another polygons, really handy for say texturing a crate face. texture one how you want it and then copy paste it to all other sides. it also supports rotating 90 degrees, mirror, and flip. the texture artist at work love it

they like Texporter a lot too

I know, I know..!!
I really do wish I had the budget for it or not offset it's cost against something else right now.. (not the laptop mentioned in the other thread

I heard a story once, its a true story. it goes something like this.

A level designer friend of mine was talking to a guy he knew online and they got on the topic of using 3d packages. My friend said he had fooled around with a 3d package a little bit and tried to make a low poly robot. It was not very good but it was good enough to show they he could make more than simple shapes in a 3d package. The guy he was talking to said he would like to try that but he does not have enough money for even a student copy of a 3d package. My friend told hime to just go get it anyway he could. The other guys says he doesn't want to steal software and that he was affraid that if he did then people would think badly of him. My friend told him that if he tries all the 3d packages for free and then gets good at one then he is more likely to get a level design job someday and when he does the company he works for will probabaly buy a copy of that software for him at work, so the software company gets the money evetually anyway. My friend's friend was not convinced and they agreed to disagree.

Time passes and my friend gets a job at a company, but they are still in need of more people. My friend told the company he knows another level designer and perhaps he should be interviewd. So phone calls are made and an interview happens. Durring the interview the candadate is asked what 3d software he knows. He said he is very interested in learning some new 3d software but has never had the money to try any of them. The company was suprised and though that was unfortanate because they don't use a CSG brush based editor and they needed someone they could get up to speed quickly, as time is money when you have milestones and such. At anyrate this candadate, my friend's friend, did not get the job.

true story

Thanks for the help there.

Kat - I'd got to a point of manually unwrapping a box, not knowing that there are tools out there that you can use to do this, like chilli-skinner.

Thanks for that link Ease - I'll snag it when I get around to needing it - right now, my mission is to skin a cube and get it into quake3

As far as getting hold of 3dsmax anyway you can, well, I'll stick with gmax for now and work around the problems - I'll most likely buy Milkshape - so long as I can export to .md3, then I can model in gmax and use Milkshape for the rest of the stuff.

I've not tried Chilli_Skinner yet but I understand it does work with GMax.

To get around the problem with GMax and get a 'template' for a skin what I often do (I do it now after I tested it out) is place a flat plane into the scene that's perfectly square (you can alter the dimentions of the plane using the size settings in the control panel on the right - or left depending on your setup).

Using the 'top view' (keyboard 'T') place it under the main model so that your flattened mesh roughly fills it; you can see what this is doing after you've done this - it's providing a rough guide for the skin texture. Once you've got it sized up roughly, make sure you're in 'top view', switch to 'full screen' (keyboard 'W' - pressing 'W' again will return you to multi windows again) and take a screen shot of that full screen. In your photoediting app cut out the square and resize it to 256x256 (or what ever size you want). That's our base skin.

All we need do now is map that to our model. You'll need to 'attach' the flat plane to the rest of your model. Select it (using the 'modify' control panel [there is a series of TABs that you can select to view different properties about the meshes you work on - select the one that says 'MODIFY' when you mouse over it - looks like a little rainbow] , make sure you're at the 'root' of the object - 'subojects' which you often see refered to is simply the stuff that makes up the mesh, ie the 'vertexes', the 'edges', the 'faces' etc...) and hit the 'attach' button in the control panel (should be about half way down). When you give the mesh a material and UVmap it the skin will now appear and fit (with a little bit of tweeking) the mesh perfectly.

Once you've UV'd the mesh, you can convert the model back into an 'editable mesh' (right click and select 'convert to...' or select the option from the drop down menu in the MODIFYcontrol panel) and continue tweeking it. We actually need to remove the plane. Select the mesh object, and select the 'element' subobject (if you can't see this in the control panel there should be a small '+' symbol next to the 'editable mesh' entry, clicking that will expand the subobject group).

To make selecting easier to see you can switch on 'edged face', this shows the wire frame of the model at the same time as the mesh (if you're using the smooth+highlights view). Where it says 'PERSPECTIVE' in the top right of the view window, right click on that word and select 'edged faces', you'll see a wire frame appear. Still in the 'element' subobject, if you now select the plane the wireframe will turn red indicating it's selected, delete it. You should be left with the original mesh with the texture still asigned and applied correctly.

You now need to reshape the mesh back to what it was originally before export. You can do this manually or use the 'MORPH' option. The morph tends to bork up sometimes with GMax so I'd suggest you do it manually 1st so you get a good idea of what's happening. Reshape your model BUT, and this is vitally important, don't reconnect the vertexes, leave the model split up the way it was when you mapped it. The reason for this is the UVmap co-ordanates won't match the outputted mesh and you'll get errors on export. Once you've done this you can export the mesh to *.MD3 from GMax; it does work quite well and if you've done what you need to you can open the model in something like MilkShape and finish the model as everything will be in place for you to do that (UVmap etc....).

I don't know if this info will help you or get you more confused, but it's a way to work around the limitations of GMax. Just about any of the tutes you find for MAX will work with GMax, they often take a bit of rethinking though due the difference in the apps.

Wow - Thanks Kat !

I'll take some of your pointers and give them a try.

One thing that I've seen in other tutorials is that they first seperate all the faces and then duplicate the model before unwrapping.

I'm just going to have to experiment, but I guess the basic premise is that you attach the flattened polys in the same order as your skin ?

I'll probably get back to you later with 100 questions - ok, it won't be that bad, as I reckon I can figure it all out based on your explanations and other tutorials.

Yah, sorry forgot to mention that... it's best to do this duplication just before you start to flatten the mesh out, so do what the tutes say and separate the mesh and then duplicate it. Hide that mesh and then continue as normal.

You use that duplicate to 'mesh morph' the flattened object back to it's original shape (that's the bit where I mentioned above that GMax sometimes borks up when doing that) but having the duplicate visible means you can manually reshape the flattened mesh once it's UVMap'd if you need to.

Wohooo ! - My first model in quake3

* cough * - yes, I know, it's about as exciting as a square block with a crappy texture on it, but I got a skinned model into quake3 ! - whoop !

Thanks a ton Kat.

I used chilliskinner to create the uvmap - it works brilliantly BTW - very easy to use.

I used your method to create the skin - taking a screenshot of the top view of the unwrapped box.

Look mom, it's a : Cube!

Congratulations to your first cube!
BTW, my first mapobject two weeks ago was a cube also

This reminds me of the feeling I had when I went through my firstroom tutorial for Quake3...

hehe.. that's totally cool BB, nout like seeing a model you made in game. I'll have to grab Chilli_Skinner now.