Modelling tutorial, in 4,398 easy steps!

[seZereth]

sometimes i wished ive had the uvwrap, cause firaxis sometimes didnt draw correct "in the lines" and i dont see how the texture will be drawn on the model, so its trial and error until it looks good. you draw your goblin completely with a brush?! well, thats very hard if your texture gets bigger in my eyes (like 256x256) but i will see if i can implement this technique into mine to improve my skills a bit more. yea, just give me the meshes, i will see how it works out.

do you know much about mimaps?! which settings would you suggest?! (right now i dont use any, cause they end up too blurry, and for blurry textures i put too much love into them

 

[Rabbit, White]

I never tested the Praetorian model but I did export quadrapeds animated from scratch just fine.

And yes, the nif viewer only shows simple key-framed animations that only affect position or rotation of the entire object directly, it doesn't show skined biped(or bone)-based animations. The Gamebryo engine does come with animation tool (previewer) that handles that part but I don't know why the folks at Firaxis didn't release it.

Anyway, I guess now we can expect some wicked animations for the goblin as well

Also, feel free to PM me about anything to do with NIF viewer and/or exporting things from max, unfortunately the Firaxis documentation is nowhere detailed enough and makes several broad assumption (you can tell from some remarks at the end it was made for their own artists, not for us modders ).

As for attaching parts in the NIF viewer - it obviously works fine and is trivial when it comes to weapons and shields, but as for body parts, I'd say only the heads kinda work. It doesn't matter if the head is exported with bone or not, although w/o bone will make things simpler. In any case once it's a separate nif you can simply attach it to the head bone of another unit, you hide the original head by scaling its bone back to like 0.1 and then scaling up the new head by 10. It definitely doesn't work perfectly but because most of the time the neck is obscured and in any case very small, the seams created between it and the body by doing this like that are not noticable.

It wouldn't work nearly as well if you try to attach whole arms or legs, or even pieces of clothes or armor since the disconnect would be much more obvious and things would clip through each other. Although I did have success with attaching hands since the joint is much simpler.

 

[Psychic_Llamas]

phew, you guys have been working overtime i go away for 2 hours and lo and behold, 2 more pages are filled up!

i absolutely love that gobbo neener, at this rate i think im going to go insane in, oh, lets say 2 days, from not beeing able to use MAX.

 

[neener]

do you know much about mimaps?! which settings would you suggest?! (right now i dont use any, cause they end up too blurry, and for blurry textures i put too much love into them

I haven't used any mipmaps yet. I fear them!

I never tested the Praetorian model but I did export quadrapeds animated from scratch just fine.

I don't have access to that thread, sadly, but you've just volunteered to be my export guru if and when things go wrong

 

[neener]

Okay, Sez, I did a couple of the things you wanted me to do.

Firstly, I stripped the Scout down to his trousers. Instead of deleting his skirt, I just welded the bottom of it up into his crotch area eek so that it looks no different to ordinary trousers, but you get to keep the original Scout dds layout.

Secondly, I made you the Venator helmet that you wanted. I went for a half-open visor with three feathers on the top, so let me know if it's good enough.

And thirdly, I made a pretty basic piece of shoulder armour.

The reason I only did those two is so that you can test them out and see if they work the way you want them to. If they work fine, I'll make more heads and armour. If they don't work, let me know what to fix.

In other news, the Orc is coming along nicely.

 

[seZereth]

Okay, Sez, I did a couple of the things you wanted me to do.

Firstly, I stripped the Scout down to his trousers. Instead of deleting his skirt, I just welded the bottom of it up into his crotch area eek so that it looks no different to ordinary trousers, but you get to keep the original Scout dds layout.

Secondly, I made you the Venator helmet that you wanted. I went for a half-open visor with three feathers on the top, so let me know if it's good enough.

And thirdly, I made a pretty basic piece of shoulder armour.

The reason I only did those two is so that you can test them out and see if they work the way you want them to. If they work fine, I'll make more heads and armour. If they don't work, let me know what to fix.

In other news, the Orc is coming along nicely.

sounds nicely, i gonna test it out later today. thank you and dont forget the skaven

 

[woodelf]

I'll grab this too neener and play around with it.

 

[seZereth]

@neener: i had a look at it, first the "human" is strangely edgy, well how to say, not round, well less round than... more edges, more hard edges than a vanilla scout... you notice it very hard when u apply the scout texture to it and then look at his face and his knees!!! dont know what went wrong, neither would i suggest using "smoothing" too much, cause this caused lag at some peoples pc, but i think firaxis used it at least a bit. dont know what you did to the model or which settings u used or whatever

to your helmet and shoulder pad... its`s GREAT!!i really love the helmet, give me more of such wicked stuff ! i skinned it quickly and created something at least close to a Venator... just the Horse and his armor need some redoing
The way you texported (or uvwrapped, dont know which one is correct when i mean the way you arrange the grids in the texture) was not bad, but could in my eyes be more connected and then perhaps coloured, dont know if that is possible but otherwise great
A, and i forgot: can you attach Gloss to everything related to Armor parts, that would make it a little bit easier... (and i reduced the textures to 64x64)

 

[neener]

@neener: i had a look at it, first the "human" is strangely edgy, well how to say, not round, well less round than... more edges, more hard edges than a vanilla scout... you notice it very hard when u apply the scout texture to it and then look at his face and his knees!!! dont know what went wrong, neither would i suggest using "smoothing" too much, cause this caused lag at some peoples pc, but i think firaxis used it at least a bit. dont know what you did to the model or which settings u used or whatever

I simply imported the model using the only import tools we have. I didn't change any settings, so if you have issues with it I'm not the guilty party. However, it would be easy to smooth the character out (and I don't think it would cause lag in Civ4) so I can do that and re-upload it if you want.

to your helmet and shoulder pad... its`s GREAT!!i really love the helmet, give me more of such wicked stuff ! i skinned it quickly and created something at least close to a Venator... just the Horse and his armor need some redoing

I'm glad something worked.

The way you texported (or uvwrapped, dont know which one is correct when i mean the way you arrange the grids in the texture) was not bad, but could in my eyes be more connected and then perhaps coloured, dont know if that is possible but otherwise great

"Connected" how, and coloured how? The absolute industry standard as far as I've ever encountered it, is to use basic black-and-white wireframes like the ones I gave you. While it is possible to colour them, most people don't. What sort of colouring did you have in mind?

A, and i forgot: can you attach Gloss to everything related to Armor parts, that would make it a little bit easier...

I have no idea how to do Gloss. I don't even know what it is in relation to Civ4, though I assume it's basically a specular map. I'd need someone to explain how to "attach Gloss to everything" though, just to be sure.

(and i reduced the textures to 64x64)

Yeah, I deliberately made them big because, as I said in the tutorial, it's usually better to paint them at a higher resolution and then lower the image size rather than try to paint a tiny picture in the first place.

 

[woodelf]

I noticed the blocky look as well, but assumed it was the importer.

 

[neener]

To be honest I assumed it was how the model was created. The reason the edges are faceted is because when you first import the model all those edges are actually open. The vertices aren't connected, and the model has holes all over it. I did actually seal them all up, but at the same time I assumed there was some sort of bizarre, Firaxian logic to having a model like swiss cheese.

 

[woodelf]

Life would be much easier if/when Firaxis releases all of the models completely.

 

[neener]

Life would be much easier if/when Firaxis releases all of the models completely.

That it would, but I doubt they ever will. It's pretty rare for that to happen, even for the big FPS games.

 

[Rabbit, White]

As far as characters looking blocky, yeah that happens, not only do they have their vertices broken up but I think they don't maintain any of the smooth groups. Anyway, I usually stitch everything up and smooth out first. Btw, like neener says, smoothing shouldn't affect performance, it was either a weird bug or more likely that the person used MeshSmooth which is different from Smooth and basically triples or more the poly-count.

Now about seZ's comment on connecting and coloring. I haven't looked at how you mapped it (and can't right now) but my guess is that you maybe broke down the map too much (i.e. into too many pieces) and it was hard to figure out which part goes where.

Gloss is pretty simple, I would post a tutorial on that but it's one paragraph and only few people will ever need to know that so it doesn't seem worth it. Anyway, here's the skinny, and if something isn't clear shoot me a PM...

Add a gloss texture to the material for the object, nothing special there, then merge into the scene an Environmental Light from Praetorian_Complete.max, go to light's include list and set it to have zero objects in Exclude list (by default it is set to specify which objects to include and there are none so...). Then export with lights. If you now view this object in the NIF viewer the glossy parts of the texture would be colored pink. You can also take a look at the light itself - at the very least you can use a different texture for the shadow (or maybe light) map to produce somewhat different looking reflections (there's a bunch of those in Art/Shared) and maybe playing around with other settings also does something, although I never experimented.

 

[neener]

Now about seZ's comment on connecting and coloring. I haven't looked at how you mapped it (and can't right now) but my guess is that you maybe broke down the map too much (i.e. into too many pieces) and it was hard to figure out which part goes where.

I really don't think I could have done any better than I did. The Scout uses the Firaxis unwrap, so it's not like I'm at fault there, and the Shoulder armour uses one single ID, so it couldn't possibly be more 'connected'. The only one that could be criticised for that is the Helmet, which is divided into 5 IDs, but that's a GOOD thing. Because of the nature of a helmet it has natural seams running all over it (for example, between the helmet and the face). It would be nigh impossible, not to mention completely undesirable, to stitch the two into one mesh.

Gloss is pretty simple, I would post a tutorial on that but it's one paragraph and only few people will ever need to know that so it doesn't seem worth it. Anyway, here's the skinny, and if something isn't clear shoot me a PM...

Add a gloss texture to the material for the object, nothing special there, then merge into the scene an Environmental Light from Praetorian_Complete.max, go to light's include list and set it to have zero objects in Exclude list (by default it is set to specify which objects to include and there are none so...). Then export with lights. If you now view this object in the NIF viewer the glossy parts of the texture would be colored pink. You can also take a look at the light itself - at the very least you can use a different texture for the shadow (or maybe light) map to produce somewhat different looking reflections (there's a bunch of those in Art/Shared) and maybe playing around with other settings also does something, although I never experimented.

Okay, that makes sense, I think. I should point out though that there's nothing stopping someone from making a gloss texture even though it isn't applied to the model. I mean, if I were to supply a gloss texture file with the NIF, it would just be an exact duplicate of the ordinary texture, because I can't predict what people are going to want glossy. If that makes sense.

 

[Rabbit, White]

Okay, that makes sense, I think. I should point out though that there's nothing stopping someone from making a gloss texture even though it isn't applied to the model. I mean, if I were to supply a gloss texture file with the NIF, it would just be an exact duplicate of the ordinary texture, because I can't predict what people are going to want glossy. If that makes sense.

Actually I'm not quite following you here ...

If you apply gloss map to the material but do not export it with the correct light, the gloss would work only if you attach the object to a node that has the env.light applied to (or affect), such as knight's sword for example.

As for the texture itself, well first of, it shouldn't be an exact duplicate of the diffuse texture simply because it is a greyscale image (like alpha). Beyond that, you're the artist, you decide what you want to be glossy or not, unless of course you're just supplying the mesh and mapping w/o drawing the actual texture, in which case yeah, you're right it's gonna be the same one for both. Although you still need to have a separate file for the gloss texture, obviously.

Oh, and you can't add gloss using NIF viewer because there's no way to add an env. light. So you could add the gloss texture but just like w/ a scene exported w/o light, it will only work if applied to an object already affected by gloss.

 

[neener]

Actually I'm not quite following you here ...

If you apply gloss map to the material but do not export it with the correct light, the gloss would work only if you attach the object to a node that has the env.light applied to (or affect), such as knight's sword for example.

I know. I'm saying that even without the gloss map working, you can still make it, since it's fairly easy to do even without being able to see its effect on the model.

As for the texture itself, well first of, it shouldn't be an exact duplicate of the diffuse texture simply because it is a greyscale image (like alpha).

I know that, but all I'm supplying to other artists is the black and white flat unwraps. I'm not doing any graphics whatsoever in this case. So if I were to go back to the model and add a gloss texture, I would then simply give Sezereth back the model with TWO copies of the dds texture, with one renamed to texture_gloss.dds or whatever. Therefore, and I'm only talking about in the meantime until I get around to re-doing the export, he could just copy the file himself and do his gloss texture in there, even though it won't work on the model yet.

 

[seZereth]

I know. I'm saying that even without the gloss map working, you can still make it, since it's fairly easy to do even without being able to see its effect on the model.



I know that, but all I'm supplying to other artists is the black and white flat unwraps. I'm not doing any graphics whatsoever in this case. So if I were to go back to the model and add a gloss texture, I would then simply give Sezereth back the model with TWO copies of the dds texture, with one renamed to texture_gloss.dds or whatever. Therefore, and I'm only talking about in the meantime until I get around to re-doing the export, he could just copy the file himself and do his gloss texture in there, even though it won't work on the model yet.

thats the point, i need it to work an environment light would help here the texture itself will be my thingie...

and yes your unwrap was very good, and you are right, that face and helmet shouldnt be connected there. So keep on doing it like that and everything will be fine. sorry if i left the impression to criticize you

so to sum it up: a smoothed model with a gloss map/ environment light attached to it (and perhaps to the helmet and shoulder too, not sure whats neccessary for them to support it, cause i think it could be enough to add them to a model with environment light...)

 

[neener]

Okay, after much wrangling with the help of Rabbit, I've got these damn gloss textures to work. So here are the new copies of the Human (newly smoothed), Shoulderpad and Helmet, all with gloss textures. I didn't include the normal diffuse textures because you already have them from last time.

Hopefully this works now, and since I at last can create gloss textures, let me know if you need anything more done.

 

[seZereth]

wow, thanks, gonna test it tomorrow