1. Do you happen to recall the parts which were made individually as opposed to the ones that were through the armor scaler? Once I get the right UV mapping for, say, a male chest, I'm going to want to save off those UV maps and apply them to as many of the same chest as possible. If two chests have a different number of vertices, that process won't work.
Yeah – I started with the normal pheno human female, which was all done from scratch. The normal human male mostly was as well, but a few parts (the hands, feet and neck, I think) I just copied the ones I'd done for the female and added some manliness. Since the large phenos use the same textures, I started from the normal ones and manually bulked them out a bit. I then used the armour scaler to create parts for the different races. A few of these needed some manual adjustment to look right – the dwarf and half-orc females needed the arms/hands to be moved inwards, and the gnome male and female needed some manual scaling to make the transition between the biceps/forearms and thighs/shins smoother.
However, I didn't add/remove any vertices once I'd finished the normal phenos, or change the UV mapping once I'd done it for the normal phenos. So the same texture for, say, a male chest will apply just as to a normal human as it does to a large half-orc. Indeed, it has to, as the body parts (except for the head) for the large phenotypes and different races all use the same texture file – the human one.
Was this what you were asking?
2. Speaking of armor scaling, which process did you use- the NWNArmory .exe or the script (I believe there's one) in NWMax?
Although I made the models in Blender, for scaling I imported them into gmax and used the Nwmax Armour Maker plugin.
3. This last question is more meta: The way you released the parts is very nice to play with because they're freshly modeled with lots of rings if I need to deform stuff, like puff out part of a bicep to replicate a rolled-up shirt sleeve. If I can get the UV mapping to work, I'm probably going to try to reduce some of the triangles by merging some of the coplaner faces- I think that's the term, where four triangles could be reduced down to two because the angles between them aren't that different. Did you avoid doing that for any reason related to lighting problems over the model or anything like that? I'm definitely not complaining, I just don't want to optimize them and hose something because I don't understand the implications.
I suspect there's plenty of room for optimisation on my models – I'm still a beginner at this, and this is the first 'big project' I've attempted. If you see a very small difference in angle between triangles, it may be there due to my attempts to create an easy to manipulate topology flow. Or it might have been that the angle was originally greater but changed after I loaded into the game to try and avoid clipping. I'd suggest you optimise away and see what happens.
