Export error in Gmax

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               Hi everyone. I'm getting an error in Gmax when trying to export a placeable object. I imported a placeable object from another game, originally in nif format. Everything looks good, but on export though I get a "maxscript rollout handling exception - unknown property ; "selfilumcolor" in unique ; Standard"

Importing in as a dxf and exporting works, but that version doesn't come in textured and I'm having problems getting that version textured.

Still pretty new with gmax so any help would be appreciated.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Michael DarkAngel]

               What tool are you using to export the model?

Save your work as a gMax scene, stick it somewhere you can make it available to us so that we can take a look at it.

Off the top of my head, sounds as if there may be a custom setting that the nif file uses (not familiar with nif files, so I could be wrong) that NWN doesn't like.


 MDA
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               Thanks for the interest.

I've got gmax 1.2 and nwnmaxplus 3.10 installed, so I'm sure I'm using nwnplus's scripts.

I've rar'd up 2 scenes - one with the nif loaded(2) and the other with the dxf(3), plus the 3 tga skins, and put them in a yahoo group where I've been doing some rigging for the Freedom Force game.

http://games.groups....hop/files/temp/

I
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               Update - I was able to install the wavefront obj scripts installed to Gmax and import the file in as a obj file. The object is a stable with 3 mesh parts with 3 tga files. The meshes import skinned correctly. I think i've converted the skins correctly from 32 bit to 24, added in the placeable 2da line, created a small hak with the mdl and tgas, and I've got the object to appear in game - but its not skinned.
It appears skinned in GMax, but do I need to still setup marerials and assign textures? I'm thinking this would be difficult since the main building is skinned by different tgas, and already appears skinned directly.



ImageShack.us
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               Further update - probably no news to those who know what they're doing, but new for a beginner like me. I had to export the nif to a obj from blender as 3 seperate meshes. Then import the obj's to gmax and set up material and texture for each part, one by one. Following the tutorials helped except some said to a add a uvw mapping modifier to the mesh and that messed up the texture.

Resized it and it looks good in game. I think the only thing left to do is set up a pwk file since you can walk through it.

This really opens thing up, at least for me. I have tons of nifs and other model types that I could convert over to NWN. I can't mesh or skin, but I've gotten pretty good at converting and rigging between games.



ImageShack.us
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Randomdays, 24 février 2013 - 11:26 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               Converting placeables from other games is very easy after you converted the first one and know what you're doing. You can convert dozens of them in a few hours if the pwks aren't too complex.
The textures often look out of place though and if you're good with finding/making better textures it's worth the extra time you need to retexture the models.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               I hope to do something like that. I think the stable fits, as well as some items from the same game.  I know there's lots out there that won't fit though.

Once I get a little more use to things, I'll try to import a creature. I think the camel and elephant are something I might use soon and upgrading them would be good practice if I can do it.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Looks nice! 

I'm curious, though.  Is there any reason you're not using the NifTools plugin for GMax (here)?  I haven't used the GMax NifTools plugin much but I've used the regular NifTools Max plugin on Max 5->2011 and except for a teensy memory leak on some versions it works very well.  It's not a turnkey solution but IMO may be less harsh on the model than Blender->OBJ->GMax workflow.  For instance, you may wind up having issues where you import an obj into GMax only to find, on further inspecition, that each face is its own subobject element or something similarly goofy, so smoothing doesn't appear to work.  That kind of thing.  It varies by what you're importing though.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 24 février 2013 - 05:58 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               I do have the niftools plugin for gmax installed, Importing worked, but trying to export the mesh to mdl gave the error above. Importing the nif into blender and then exporting it dxf or obj to gmax gave me a mesh that would export, but the dxf came in untextured and in both cases it combined the 3 parts into a single mesh. The mesh is skinned by 3 full 512x512 textures. Since I didn't know a way to assign the textures to the different parts of a single mesh, I had to go the route of importing each piece and texturing one by one.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Thanks for getting those files to me, Randomdays!  I whipped up a little "material cleaner" NWMax/NWMax Plus plugin here:



All it does it convert the material on the selected meshes to Standard (which is what NWN uses) from the Nif material shader.  The only other bit of logic in there, IIRC, is that if the mesh doesn't have a material with a diffuse channel, it deletes it.  This seems a bit draconian but at least for the Nif models I've cleaned, anything without a diffuse channel is going to be something you want to toss, anyway.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               Thanks very much for looking into this OTR. I'll be working with this a lot I'm sure.