Merricksdad's Middledark Tileset

[Legacy_Quevy]

               

I love all of this and your patience in extracting all the material, I can not wait to see these on nwn.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

ok, I'm calling extraction done, now just gotta work on conversion. Looks like I already had most of it anyway, but now I can be near-certain. Still a pain in the ass matching models with textures though. There are some atlas files that keep getting used over and over, and that makes things both easy and difficult, since I don't know when the items were made if they are not prefixed with a kit, or if the texture name does not match exactly the model file. And then there are models with multiple meshes inside which intend multiple textures. It's guesswork after a while. Many of the dungeon parts I did yesterday still have the wrong atlas on them, and many of the stones I am just guessing on. Many textures, both atlases and otherwise, work on most of the stones, and there is a set of stone piles which seems to have been made with that intent.

 

Might take the rest of the week off of this though, because I have some unfinished business with the new house. Property lines don't match county lines, and as early as 1950, looks like the houses on that street were all over the property lines on purpose, so they could align to the road. Nobody cared back then. No fences back then. But good news! We have a 15 year exception on taking your neighbor's property legally, and I found documents and records that show visually that the sidewalk, fence, and patio were all there in 1997, so if push comes to shove, I can make a claim and they're mine. I'd rather figure it out without legal work first though. I also found out last night that the legalese for the back line was never updated, but two years ago the people on the back side of the block had their property adjusted with an award of 5 feet, and our side never got informed. Makes the books like spaghetti. Might as well shred them and start the city layout over again. So all total, I've lost up to 5 feet in the back, never owned 8 feet on the side of my house, and at the back corner I do not own that 12 feet with no fence. But I can claim the 8 feet, not the 12 feet, and nobody will probably ever claim the 5 on the back, so not really a big deal.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Working on the textures for another 500 placeables tonight. Taking way too long without property material listings, but I'm almost done with those. After that, just going to do a few more pulls from middledark and mantol-derith and call it done. I really don't want to get into doing the entire game, just the parts I want personally, and a few more standard DM placeables I think everybody else will enjoy. This last set of 500 or so is all the DM prefixed placeables, and includes things from town, caves, dungeons, and just about anything you can place in SCL as the DM. There are a few exceptions, and I don't really know why that is, except that nothing about this game is easily found in one spot. In total, I found a useful almost 17k files, and about a quarter of those were the textures. Most of the other stuff is too large to process, and is filled with duplicate or slightly warped placeables anyway, so it isn't really worth digging through.


If, in the future, somebody wants to do a direct conversion of SCL caverns straight to NWN, that potential does actually exist, but the poly count will be off the charts. All the files are there, you just have to figure out which ones go with what map part, since they're all named strangely. For the most part, what we name meshes in NWN is what they use as filenames. Sometimes the files are incrementally in order, sometimes they are not. The naming schemes are also not standardized across tilesets, or even expansions. Not impossible to do, but not worth my time at the moment.


In any case, give another week and I should have a crap load of placeables ready to show on the vault. I'm just going to rename the textures to something more friendly, and then make sure the scale on many of these models is more useful for builders.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Draygoth28]

               Did you say you had a Drizzt model?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Did you say you had a Drizzt model?

Why yes, there is a Drizzt model. There are also loot icons for his gear looks like. Also a big ass panther.


Edit: I pulled out and merged what I could find. There are a few problems. The OBJ exporter for unity is returning NAN values for the tverts on the torso, no matter which copy I use, or how many times I try it, so that needs refitted by hand. The eyes on this model are not separate, so the image is looking for some texture which does not exist. Instead, I've packed the texture the head comes with, as well as the eyes texture separately. They'll have to be modified by hand. The head texture also has some minor vert welding issues that need adjusted. There is no texture data for the cape, so it's black, and also has no inner mesh, so only shows from the back. I don't believe it was ever used in the game. There is also a cowl/hood up variety, but it does not cover his hears, so it's not used in the game as far as I can see, so I didn't include it in the mesh merge. It also has no texture data. Guen has no eyes, and the standard eyes models don't fit her. I've included the eye textures for both "cat" and "guen". The eyes need recreated. There are no drizzt_hand models, so I grabbed elf_hands_7. There is no texture which fits this hand mesh. I've included the specular textures for two drow skin colors. Applied in the image below to the hands is the first specular color. They're probably useless. Icingdeath and Twinkle come Todd Lockwood style, and have no magical colorants as described in the books. They're dark metal, and require an envmap. I've included the drow hand crossbow and texture, as well as the panther idol, which uses the same "guen" texture as the live one. The texture for the bracers was scale and offset shifted, so I fixed it manually. You might want to investigate it. I'm really not a fan of this version of Drizzt, because it ignores the books entirely. For instance, he hasn't had his green cloak for a LONG damn time. Twinkle and Icingdeath are only termed twins, but they're unrelated items, and are not of drow craft, so should not look like that. Drizzt's original drow leather and chain has been gone for a long time, so I'm not sure why he keeps being portrayed in drow leather. I think the artists and people in charge of the art must have got stuck on Homeland to Sojourn and never actually read the books after that, which makes me very sad.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Draygoth28]

               Over all not bad. Gwen looks really good. The Drizzt model could use some love. maybe remove the sword hilts so that he only has sheaths equipped and maybe remove the cloak and make a custom one from existing NWN cloaks.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

DM placeables are finished. I just need to export them and check their scales. Also... and this is the tedious part, I need to rename all the textures, as their names are all way too damn long for NWN engine. I'm thinking to do the unthinkable and use a numbering system for the textures, making their names absolutely meaningless, and then pack them in a single HAK file. I'll adjust the exports to show the new name. Many of them are shared. I mean many. After cleanup, there are only 247 useful unique-enough placeables in the DM toolset. This excludes ones I am specifically putting in the underdark export. I'll probably image capture and catalog the objects, and then list their entry and texture fields on a spreadsheet or something. There are just too many to play with to not catalog them properly. And this is really just the first 1/3 of the unique extracts. This dead game is going to offer up so many genetics to NWN!!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Hey'a, not that I am going to go right out and get a copy, because I simply don't have time for that, but did anybody else know that Pillars of Eternity was built with unity assets!? I'm told there might be a way to get those out too!!

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

Well if you are going to rename the textures with numbers I would suggest using the enumeration setting of Ant Renamer 2. 

 

TR

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_thirdmouse]

               

Hey'a, not that I am going to go right out and get a copy, because I simply don't have time for that, but did anybody else know that Pillars of Eternity was built with unity assets!? I'm told there might be a way to get those out too!!

 

I'm hesitant to comment because I don't know which end is up in any of these things and am likely of little use here, but I do own PoE... is there a link or anything with more information somewhere? 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

All I got is google. And the forums for dissecting SCL talk about the PoE.

 

So, I think, the one thing you can do, depending on where it installed, is to try to find files that go with it named .asset or .asset3D. Those are single source, or multi-source packages with the correct extensions. However, Im also finding that .resource in SCL or no extension at all are also both valid unity resource types. If you find .asset or .resource we could assume they're valid and you could try opening them with a program called UABE (Unity Asset Bundle Extractor). It's a bit weird, but it works. It will open the file, much like a zip file, and let you see what's inside, if you click the view info button. What it does is show you a readout of the content of a pak file, or list of pack files. It has sort-by-type capability so you can select and export multiple files of the same kind. It can export unity images as TGA, and unity models as wavefront OBJ. My program converts their messed up wavefront objects to a sloppy MDL format that GMAX can import, including only verts, tverts and faces. UABE obj file doesn't show skins or bones, and their exporter sometimes misses entire mesh sections. It also doesn't work perfectly on some large models, and exports tverts with all the V values set to -1.NANx. Guessing their code has some divide by zero error, or a bad text to number call.


Update: UABE extracted TGA file do not work with NWN. You'll need to open them in a graphics program and save them again, so the extra layers are removed. This may cause the alpha layer to be inverted, or you could get one of the wrong layers used as the alpha layer, but the non-alpha layers are at least in the correct order. They worked just fine for me in gmax 1.2. It was only after I tried them in the toolset that I found they were all corrupt looking. I batch converted them in Paint Shop Pro, TGA to TGA and it downgraded and wiped the unusable layer data.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well if you are going to rename the textures with numbers I would suggest using the enumeration setting of Ant Renamer 2. 

 

TR

Thanks, but I was just going to do it with a script, making table of all the names used in the files, changing them to a new name, and then changing the file name to match the new name. I can then copy the data in the table to my catalog file too, for backward reference in the future.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Textures moved and renamed. All transfers totally operational. DM objects exporting now (after I tweaked the nwmax exporter to recognize disabled sanity checks). I'll then check some of these to see if adding smoothing groups looks better. I did the pumpkins and they look good if you just add a single smoothing group to the whole thing and DON'T weld verts. Adding both breaks it and makes it look different than in SCL. (Correction: setting to zero smoothing and no shadow, as well as an override ambient and diffuse, since all the textures have blue diffuse for some reason. Most of these crash the toolset. They'll need tweaked by hand for perfection, and I don't have time for that.)

 

So, due to the lack of welding, there are a lot of verts that seem redundant in the exports, inflating them somewhat. Compiled versions may not show this as much. Not sure, but I simply don't compile mine for various reasons. (Correction: I welded everything and reduced the vert count on larger objects by half.)

 

The 247 DM objects require 72 unique textures from SCL, which will be packed all in a single HAK for viewing.

 

I'm thinking to make a single module with three levers, so instead of making a copy of every single object in the new hak, I'll just cycle through them using levers representing the digit of the new object appearance. (Nope: Can't do that with script as far as I can see, without first making a blueprint for every single object, so I put one of each object in a 16x16 cityscape.)

 

Should be posted by tonight. If these go well, I'll finish up my cave extract packages maybe this week, between finishing packing for my move on friday/saturday.


...


Edit: this is taking me much longer than expected. Most, if not all of the TGA files were not in a format that NWN/Toolset can view correctly. Once I batch converted those to a lower version, some of them had inverted masks, so I'm doing those by hand....




...

 

It's up on the vault. Some more of the objects went invisible after I put the images in the hak file. I'll take a look at those when I get time, unless somebody beats me to it. I think I need to remove the alpha layer from those textures entirely. I think that layer must have been used for something other than alpha in the game.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well I see 18 downloads so far. Has anybody encountered any problems with any of the models, other than their long load times? The work I did on the pumpkins was removed when I batch fixed the meshes. Some meshes are best NOT welded. Others are best NOT smoothed. UABE was not able to preserve smoothing groups for me, so we're kind of left at having to fix them by hand if we want to use any of these objects. You'll also notice that the meshes are made to be used top down or isometric. This means that many of the meshes don't have backs and bottoms. Others do. The SCL team used some pre-existing prefab libraries, and some of them are complete, while others are not. Also, that bring up a warning: some of these assets may be royalty-based assets owned by other third parties. I have no way of finding out which ones fit that description other than extensive by-hand searching, which I don't have time for. If you find sources, and they specifically say those meshes cannot be used without a license, let me know. I'll drop it from the hak without complaint.

 

I don't personally plan to use most of these. Mostly I just wanted to get them out there so other people could pick and choose, and maybe even update them to work better with NWN. I don't think I will probably ever update that first package of DM placeables.

 

When I get the underdark bits finished, those WILL be completely cleaned up. I may end up using every single one, so I want to have them completely useful.

 

One of the things I wanted to do is build a local walkmesh for each item. I have this script that takes local walkmeshes on placed objects in a scene and builds a tile walkmesh from the sub-resources, using ray-trace straight down from above the model. I can set the sensitivity level so I can get super accurate tracing, or I can get good-enough tracing for lower poly walk meshes. Basically it glues all the wok parts together and removes anything you wouldn't see if you looked straight down on the scene, except the in-built merge functions in GMAX are all fubar, and you can't duplicate them directly without the same math problems. 3D mesh merging is hard on the math, so I figured ray tracing with a grain size worked better. What this does is makes rectangle meshes at a size/spacing set by the user and then welds all the verts. The rectangle corners match up with the first walkmesh face touched by a ray pointing down from space. What you get is pretty much like the satellites building the 3D surfaces of Mars. It then fetches the material type for the face it touched, and paints that new poly with that material color, preserving things like water or blocking of line of sight. Ultimately it still has to follow the rules of the NWN engine, so when I build the WM for individual placeables, I have to take that into consideration.


Ok, well it's time to run the laundry, the dishes, and pack the final boxes for my move. This is just about the last day to do it, since my kid finishes school tomorrow.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Tarot Redhand]

               

I didn't even realise you had posted them. Also a direct link in one of your posts would have been nice. Anyway, I've now downloaded them.

 

TR