2251 replies to this topic

[LadyKayBee]

Whoops, apparently there was a typo in the noesis batch process, so the obj's werent in the right folder.

[Heffay]

CaptainKBX, on 12 August 2015 - 09:18 AM, said:

Whoops, apparently there was a typo in the noesis batch process, so the obj's werent in the right folder.

The Noesis export drives me nuts. The geometry is all fooked up, it's hard to use, yadda yadda yadda. My new tool (which is being tested and used by some people already) does a much better job far easier. I'll be updating my original post with new info ... probably this weekend.

[Jayce Haebdun]

I've been making maps for Tabletop Simulator, to play Alpha Strike with my remote friends. I would like to get models of the MWO mechs to use in TTS, but these ones here are WAY to high in poly count.

So I exported the Awesome, then started to block out a model using much simpler blocks (I think the torso was only about 20 faces/quads, and it's really, really slow.

I then found MeshLab, and it cleaned up the model well, but I'm still looking at 8K+ vertices, and waaay too many faces to use it in TTS.

Anyone have any advice on how to convert these models to something with a drastically lowered poly count?

I'm really hoping there is some software out there that will "wrap" a selection of meshes with one outer mesh that I can then tweak a little. Does it exist?

[Heffay]

Jayce Haebdun, on 12 August 2015 - 10:22 AM, said:

I've been making maps for Tabletop Simulator, to play Alpha Strike with my remote friends. I would like to get models of the MWO mechs to use in TTS, but these ones here are WAY to high in poly count.

So I exported the Awesome, then started to block out a model using much simpler blocks (I think the torso was only about 20 faces/quads, and it's really, really slow.

I then found MeshLab, and it cleaned up the model well, but I'm still looking at 8K+ vertices, and waaay too many faces to use it in TTS.

Anyone have any advice on how to convert these models to something with a drastically lowered poly count?

I'm really hoping there is some software out there that will "wrap" a selection of meshes with one outer mesh that I can then tweak a little. Does it exist?

Blender has a couple of functions that could help with that. One is a Simplify modifier, which I've never used and am not sure how useful it would be. The other is retopology, which is how they go from the high poly models to the game resolution ones. It can probably be redone a lot more aggressively, but I've never done that and am not sure of the work involved.

I know blendercookie.com has a retopo tutorial, but it's probably in their subscriber section. It's worth subscribing though. Great website for learning Blender.

[Jayce Haebdun]

Thanks for the suggestion! So these models here do not respond well to Decimate at all (at least, not well enough to make a usable model). However, the "Mountain of Mechs" thread has a bunch of models there that are complete without tens of thousands of overlapping points. I downloaded all of those, and found that I can use a Decimate (Collapse) on them down to 0.15 and still retain a good shape. That gets the avg OBJ down to about 200K, which is tolerable in TTS (and under 2k faces).

Then I drop them in Wings3D (I'm terrible with Blender still) and put them on a hex base, then run an autosmooth on them (to detect hard edges) and finally export a simple UV texture that uses the material faces for the starting texture. Defining the hard edges doubles the OBJ size to 400K or so, and the UV map gets it up to 500K. That's about the upper limit of what I'd like to use in TTS, but it's loading smoothly, and I'll keep the mechs we're not using in a "bag" (so they don't load). End result of my first test:

http://puu.sh/jCfgC/db974eebbb.jpg

The far left Warhammer is a basic blocking out of a model I didn't make, with a simple texture. I didn't make it, it's about ~100K.

The second from the left is just a straight OBJ after the decimate, placed on a base, and dropped into TTS. It only recognizes the default material layer, and with no edge hardening it smooths everything out. ~200K

The third one has edge hardening defined and a UV map to a 128x128 texture (8K). The whole model is ~400K.

The last model on the far right (the one I'll use) has a bigger texture (512x512 -- 20K) and the whole model is ~550K.

Plus, I can color tint the armor of the model in TTS. I'm so happy this worked--the most important thing is that the process for each model is very fast:

Import LWO into Blender. Apply Decimate (collapse) modifer @ 0.15 export OBJ file. Import OBJ into Wings3D, absolute scale model (1.8" for assault down to 1.5" for light), snap the bottom of a foot to the hex base, center model @ 0,0 on the hex base, auto cleanup, auto harden edges, auto UV map, create 512x512 texture (2 clicks), export texture, export OBJ.

The last version of the warhammer I made took me 2 minutes from start to finish! Only about 150 more models to go now!

[Heffay]

OK, I got my Cryengine Converter program stable enough so that it works great for MWO files! I've updated my original post and am working on getting the videos redone to reflect the changes. The armature stuff will still need Noesis for now, but working on getting that fixed up.

This also works for non mech assets. You can import building files and the like as well! Enjoy!

[Wonderdog]

Nice! I'll be giving the updated tools a try this week Heffay.

[Jayce Haebdun]

Did something change with this? I finished importing all the LWOs that were in the other thread for Tabletop Simulator, and thought I'd try my hand and importing some of these again, since I've found TTS can handle up to about 10K faces, and 3K is pretty smooth.

Short version: I got this:


Long version:
I grabbed the cgf-converter, and the mech-importer. I've got PowerShell 4, 7Zip, and Blender.

I put all my PAK files in D:\MWOModels and upacked them. Noticed that there were hardly any mechs in there, then found a bunch of mech PAKs in the mechs subdirectory of the MWO folders (which wasn't there last time I tried this 2 weeks ago). So I copied them over too and unpacked them as well.

I put cgf-converter.exe and mech-importer.ps1 into my PATH.

Fire up powershell, go to the catapult body folder (figured I'd do your example first) and run the cgf-converter command. I get a couple "cgf-converter has stopped working popups" for some of the files it tried (I felt like it tried to do every file, instead of just *.cg*) anyway, it finished, backed up one folder and ran mech-importer, which completed without incident. Copied the text and opened Blender, then dropped it into the python console.

The picture was the result I got. Now I look at your example and it looks great. This one is all deformed and looks like ****, with 1050 holes in it according to NetFabb and Wings3D. What happened?

EDIT/UPDATE - I went back and did everything using Neosis instead of cgf-converter, and the Catapult looks great now. Did I grab the wrong version? (The one from the dropbox link)

Edited by Jayce Haebdun, 22 August 2015 - 01:28 PM.

[Heffay]

I'll have to take a look. That definitely doesn't look right.

You might be using an old version of mech importer. Can you download the latest version of that and give it a try?

I took out the remove doubles and tris to quads in the new version, as those were causing problems.

Edited by Heffay, 22 August 2015 - 12:46 PM.

[Jayce Haebdun]

Deleted the Catapult directory.

Regrabbed cgf-converter.exe from the front page (the DropBox link). Redownloaded the mech-importer.ps1 script, and changed the $basedir to "d:\mwomodels". Both are in my c:\scripts folder (in my path).

Unpack the catapult.pak again, so I've got fresh files. In powershell, navigate to catapult\body, and ran:

foreach ($file in (Get-ChildItem *.cga)) { cgf-converter.exe $file -objectdir "d:\mwomodels" }

That runs without issue.

Back up to the root catapult folder, run:

mech-importer.ps1

That runs without issue.

Copy the text from import.txt and drop it into the Blender python console, and I get the same as the picture above.

If I use Neosis to convert the CGAs to OBJs, then run mech-importer, they look great, materials (mostly) applied already and everything. But when I use the cgf-converter it shits the bed.

http://puu.sh/jKQUl/026de2bbb9.txt

There's the import.txt I'm getting using this method.

Since switching back to neosis is what fixes it--I feel like I must have the wrong version of CGF-Converter. Am I supposed to download something from the GitHub site too? I just grabbed the EXE from DropBox (because I couldn't tell what to grab from GitHub)

Edited by Jayce Haebdun, 22 August 2015 - 01:38 PM.

[Heffay]

Jayce Haebdun, on 22 August 2015 - 01:33 PM, said:

Deleted the Catapult directory.

Regrabbed cgf-converter.exe from the front page (the DropBox link). Redownloaded the mech-importer.ps1 script, and changed the $basedir to "d:\mwomodels". Both are in my c:\scripts folder (in my path).

Unpack the catapult.pak again, so I've got fresh files. In powershell, navigate to catapult\body, and ran:

foreach ($file in (Get-ChildItem *.cga)) { cgf-converter.exe $file -objectdir "d:\mwomodels" }

That runs without issue.

Back up to the root catapult folder, run:

mech-importer.ps1

That runs without issue.

Copy the text from import.txt and drop it into the Blender python console, and I get the same as the picture above.

If I use Neosis to convert the CGAs to OBJs, then run mech-importer, they look great, materials (mostly) applied already and everything. But when I use the cgf-converter it shits the bed.

http://puu.sh/jKQUl/026de2bbb9.txt

There's the import.txt I'm getting using this method.

Since switching back to neosis is what fixes it--I feel like I must have the wrong version of CGF-Converter. Am I supposed to download something from the GitHub site too? I just grabbed the EXE from DropBox (because I couldn't tell what to grab from GitHub)

No, the .exe from Dropbox is the only thing you need. And I verified that both that and mech-importer.ps1 are the latest versions on the dropbox as well.

Can you upload the cplt_left_arm_forearm_ppc_eh1.obj and cplt_left_arm_forearm_ppc_eh1.cga file somewhere and PM me the location? And the centre_torso versions of those as well. I'll see if I can figure out what's going on.

[Jayce Haebdun]

To get you those files I renamed my Neosis created Catapult folder, and extracted the PAK file again. Ran it through cgf-exporter.exe again, then mech-importer.ps1, and dropped the import.txt into the Python console.

[img width=800]http://puu.sh/jLSlL/cd829cca35.jpg[/img]

I don't know man, it worked great this time. But I have a new problem now:

Actually, it's not a problem--it's that I don't know how to do it, and I'm really struggling at the moment. I'm using a Victor for my example:

[img width=800]http://puu.sh/jLTqI/b2b01f8e06.jpg[/img]

I start off with the base 3039 Victor. I've selected only the parts I want and moved them to a second layer, then joined them into one object.

I'm left with 73K verts and 24K faces/tris. Waaay too big to import into Tabletop Simulator.

So I remove doubles (down to 14K verts), then convert Tris to Quads aggressively (down to 12.7K faces). That exports as 2.1 MB, still just a smidge too large to import, but I'm going smaller regardless.

Bring in... the Decimate modifier. I can clip 22 degrees Planar and get down to 7.3K faces--which I can import now--but I also apply a 0.7 Collapse after that (30% reduction) and get down to 6K faces without anything becoming detached.

[img width=800]http://puu.sh/jLU8T/44d434e8dd.jpg[/img]

As you can see it still looks pretty good considering it now has 1/4 of the faces from the original mesh.

But when I export this to OBJ, I need to export a *single* texture to apply in Tabletop Simulator. Now I can convert the DDS file to JPG and import that, but that only works for the pieces that have "victor_body_diff" for the texture. The weapons and cockpit glass use "variable" and "cockpit" for the textures.

Now in Wings3D, you can create a texture from your UVMap and set it to Draw Faces which will export the UV Map with the textures you've used, even from multiple sources, resulting in one texture.

How do I do this in Blender? I just want to take this model I've reduced down to this low-poly version, and export a single texture file that I can import into Tabletop Simulator.

[img width=800]http://puu.sh/jLZ0A/b31e54de8d.jpg[/img]

The left one is just a simple texture export from Wings3D, and the right is when I just merged the body texture files in GIMP--as you can see the lasers and cockpit don't have the right texture. I'm assuming there has got to be a way to export the materials from Blender into a single texture file. I hope so.

Edited by Jayce Haebdun, 23 August 2015 - 01:02 PM.

[Jayce Haebdun]

So after hours of failed attempts I guess what I need to do is called Baking in Blender? Took a long time to figure out that the Cycles Blender menus look different!

So I took my Victor, clicked the node tab (I think) and added a new UV map (called it VictorUV). Then I went to edit mode, selected everything, and did SmartUV. I selected all of the resulting UV in the UV/Window and chose New Image, calling it "VictorBaked".

Went to the Render tab, scrolled all the way down to Bake, and set it to Diffuse Color (which from what I read is what I want) and then hit Bake.

Crash.

Crashes every time.

1. Is this the correct steps to export a single flat texture?
2. How do I get it to stop crashing?

[Heffay]

Jayce Haebdun, on 23 August 2015 - 02:47 PM, said:

So after hours of failed attempts I guess what I need to do is called Baking in Blender? Took a long time to figure out that the Cycles Blender menus look different! So I took my Victor, clicked the node tab (I think) and added a new UV map (called it VictorUV). Then I went to edit mode, selected everything, and did SmartUV. I selected all of the resulting UV in the UV/Window and chose New Image, calling it "VictorBaked". Went to the Render tab, scrolled all the way down to Bake, and set it to Diffuse Color (which from what I read is what I want) and then hit Bake. Crash. Crashes every time. 1. Is this the correct steps to export a single flat texture? 2. How do I get it to stop crashing?

I believe baking is what you want to do, but I don't have any experience with that. I'm not really sure how it's going to work though, with a bunch of joined objects. Technically each part of the mech has its own unwrap, although it's mapped on to the normal diffuse/spec/normal images. Maybe that will still work out fine. Actually you may not need to unwrap everything with smart unwrap, since the UV maps should already be done. I think all you need to do is bake the texture, which I think is under the... render section? Near the bottom. I think. But anyway, don't muck with the UVs, as they are already done.

As for why Blender is crashing...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's Blender!

Edited by Heffay, 24 August 2015 - 10:53 AM.

[Wonderdog]

Its £3000 cheaper than 3dsmax, so I guess we can't complain

#Wonderdog

[Andreas80]

Jayce Haebdun, on 23 August 2015 - 02:47 PM, said:

1. Is this the correct steps to export a single flat texture?
2. How do I get it to stop crashing?

Maybe you could try to start blender from cmd.exe !
If Blender crashes there should be a error message. Can you post the message?

[mad kat]

Been away on holiday so not got much further but getting where i want. So much more to do though. :-(

[Jayce Haebdun]

Andreas80, on 25 August 2015 - 01:07 AM, said:

Maybe you could try to start blender from cmd.exe !
If Blender crashes there should be a error message. Can you post the message?

Well I've been making 3D boards for Tabletop Simulator as well, and when recently made the city maps, ended up with three textures applied to three different UV maps. After some trial and error and more tutorials, I managed to export the OBJ from Wings3D into Blender, then join the objects, create a new UV, make a new image texture, SmartUV a new map, and bake the texture. Worked perfectly, into a new single UV with a single texture on it. Was so happy.

But that was Blender Render. Haven't tried doing a Mech again, yet, but when I tried before, it just closes Blender. No error message at all. Just *blink*. Off.

I'm out of town on a business trip, but when I get home I'll try again. I've baked 4 different maps now making 3D boards, so I'm feeling much more confident with the baking process now.

Here's two of the city boards I just made baking all the textures into one UV/texture:

Edited by Jayce Haebdun, 26 August 2015 - 03:25 PM.

[Heffay]

Err... holy ****. I mean holy shitballs. That's incredible!

[Jayce Haebdun]

Well I don't know about all that, but thank you. Notice the Warhammer mini on top of one of the buildings for scale. I use these all in Tabletop Simulator to play the Battletech boardgame with friends online.



That's a shot of all the boards I've made so far, plus the 77 mechs I've done. I'm a pretty novice modeler though. These maps are just a bunch of hexagon cylinders (quadded) that I expanded out to make the board, then I put the texture on it, and use that as a guide to make all the buildings. Then I texture the tops/sides of the buildings, export it all to Blender, then bake everything into a single UV/texture, which is amazing. If I understood the cycles render better I might be able to test it with one of these maps, but I don't understand it at all.

Edited by Jayce Haebdun, 26 August 2015 - 05:43 PM.