Desperately seeking enlightenment

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               As most people on here know, I normally only deal with flat models. There is a simple reason for this. No matter what the version, I have never ever been able to get nwgmax to export whatever I have been doing in gmax. I recently recieved a lot of help from someone (they will get copious praise in the readme, when it is released) with a project that I am involved with. Not wanting to be a total pain in the probervial donkey's rectum (eat that nanny software ) I used a little utility that I wrote (and that has been well behaved before) to enlarge the model that they made for me. Unfortunately while the model (well all 20 of them to be precise) grew correctly, the texture decided to become misaligned. So biting the bullet, I tried importing it into gmax. Hmm, that was easy enough. Next figure out how to get the texture to into the correct alignment. Check. I thought it was going too well. Try as I might, I cannot get nwmax to export the corrected model. It appears to go through all of the motions but nothing gets exported. Obviously I am doing something wrong, but I don't know what.

What I am therefore asking is, would someone please post a tutorial on using nwmax to export a completed model complete with aurora base to a .mdl file. The only thing is it must be for someone with less grey matter than a brick ie so detailed that even I can get the $!£&@##!!! thing to work!

Thank you in advanced (and good luck to anyone who decides to undertake this onerous task, you'll need it)

TR
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Randomdays]

               I had this problem when I was 1st working with gmax/ nwmax. Doing some research in my case it turned out that you don't start gmax with the gmax shortcut, even though the nwmax bar comes up, it won't export. I had to start from the nwmax shortcut. Then the export file appeared. If that's not the problem in your case, I'm not sure what it could be.

I also found, for me anyway, that if you export, make a change in the file and export again, the new file will not overwrite the old one. To get the new one to appear, I have to delete the old one.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               Thanks for that. While it didn't directly point me to getting it working there were enough clues in what you said for me to finally figure out how to do so. I had suspected that nwgmax wouldn't overwrite an existing model, but that alone didn't solve it. The current version of nwgmax (as far as I remember) doesn't have a shortcut for starting the snooper and gmax at the same time. I clicked on the executable in the scripts\\nwgmax folder but oly later realised there was something in my system tray. Remembering something about a snooper from when I last tried to get gmax to work I tried again and hey presto. I can now export .mdl files. Yay!

Now all I have to do is to figure how to manually align textures (hopefully there will be something in my second hand copy of the gmax bible). I thought I had it sorted (and I very nearly have) but not quite. Cest la vie.

Thanks again.

TR
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Tarot Redhand, 30 mai 2013 - 01:29 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               With your model open in gmax, apply your new texture via the material editor (the red ball looking icon in the upper right corner, I think).

Then select your desired part of the model, click on the modify tab on the right, make sure your model has the trimesh modifier added to it.  If it does, use the drop-down menu to add the Unwrap UVW.  You should get an "edit" button to appear.  With that, you can drag around vertices in the editor window, and it'll change how the texture is aligned.

You can drag that editor window out of the way to see how it's looking on the model, and you can always re-open it again if you see a spot that needs further adjusting.

Yeah, years after first getting into gmax and I'm just now getting around to working more with this one.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Tarot, if the way you're scaling the meshes is messing with the texture (the UV coordinates) try doing it in GMax by hand.  You'll need to reset the xforms on your model afterward, before exporting, to make sure the scaling "sticks".  External utilities often do what they say on the tin but if they're fed unexpected data they might get wonky results.  NWMax's creature scaler would probably work, too, I think.

You can grab the GMax help files here and they're also included in the Omnibus if you have that.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               @AD, thanks for that. I'll see if I can get it to work when I log out.

@OTR, My utility just does a scalar multiply to the verts and tverts in both the mdl and any associated pwk. Up until now it has worked fine with whatever I've fed to it. Is there something else it should be working with in the files? I've got the omnibus and it's a great resource.

TR
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything other than that tvert data which would need to be touched.  The thing I like about doing this stuff in G/Max is 99% of it is WYSIWYG.  Anyway, have you tried running the same model through a scale with something like ObsidianSS and (assuming it works) checking for deltas between your output and theirs?

On second thought...is it even necessary to scale tverts?  They typically exist in a 0-1 space and although NWN will handle stuff outside of that, multiplying their values wouldn't (I would think) be necessary.  Because of this phenomena, you can have a 1024x1024 or 256x256 version of the same texture and won't require any tvert data change to dispay them both correctly if you swap a hires texture for a lores one, say, in the override directory.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               @AD, Thank you for those instructions. The first one I used it on I pressed edit and went Yeeeeep!!! It was so horrendously complicated. I went away and cut the texture in half and tried again. That was so much better. Finished the edit and tried it in-game. Works great. Did the other 19 and all work flawlessly. In fact the only thing is it worked too well. So well in fact that I now have to go back to do 171 models that while they also work well in-game, I can now cut the 57 textures in half and re-attach them saving oodles of space. On the plus-side, I have now actually done something in a 3d modelling program that I do intend to release (eventually - there's still tons to do).

So once again thanks (I think - if your ears start to burn...)

TR