Advice on texturing

[x3kj 1247]

You can weight it in objectbuilder, but i have no idea why you would want to do that... it doesnt have all the nice tools, and in 3dsmax you can make some animations to preview the results.

 

The shadowlod thing is just a debugging method - maybe it wouldnt move with the head properly, or it was misplaced compared to the res LOD (which would result in those shadowed surfaces). If it shows like you expected then this is not it.

[Macser 776]

You could probably get away with it in OB. You've got a lot of rigid plates essentially. A lot of them could be weighted to a value of 1 (100%). The default should be 100% as soon as you associate a piece to a selection. You can tweak it. But blending influences is not something the official tools were ever good at.

 

You will come across some clipping issues. Usually at joints or areas where those plates should slide over each other. Like the abdomen. Depending on how extreme it is you may want to let some bending take place.

[Johno89 20]

I've gotten the armor working in Arma now, its just all its verts are red atm.

 

 

A lot of this weighting stuff is new to me and I've never heard of the skin modifier before let alone used it. Suffice to say it scares me. As I'm just learning atm i'm gonna go ahead in Object builder and weight the armor. I have used the ODOL web converter on the Imperial assault armor model and i can see how they weighted theirs. So im gonna use that as a reference for mine. Gonna follow this as a guide aswell. 

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[Macser 776]

There's nothing scary about it. It's just another skill to learn. 

 

I can't say I'm familiar with OB. Although it does share many functions with it's predecessors.The red colour is an indication of which verts are influenced by a selection.

 

I don't think there's visual feedback on blending though. Which is why a lot of people do that kind of work externally. You should be able to see a list of the weight distributions for each selection by right clicking it in the list.

 

If you want them to stay rigid, then a 100% weighting to a selection is fine. It's only when you need a blend between two selections it might get a bit messy.

[x3kj 1247]

i can recommend this to start out (and the rest of the associated parts - 13 in total)

At 3:30 he mentions max bone count -> set this to 4. Arma does not allow more than 4 bones assigned to a vertex (it removes any excess ones and causes rpt spam). The skinning tutorial is part of a general character riggin tut series:

 

 

 

You need a full skeleton (with 3ds max bone objects) to be able to skin your mesh. Preferably as a rig, that allows easy animation for previewing your skinning results. Toadie released a rig for 3ds max a while ago.

Do not use the "BIPED" skeleton of max - wont work in arma.

[Johno89 20]

Cheers for help. I'll look into it, but I'm not sure it would work for the armor (based on my limited understanding). The set you've seen isn't the character uniform as such. Its completely hollow with lots of different components. When i tried to add the arma man bones to it from the samples and apply the skin modifier it didnt work (but this most likely is because i was doing it wrong). In object builder I assign it as a vest in the config file.

 

 

 

[x3kj 1247]

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Cheers for help. I'll look into it, but I'm not sure it would work for the armor (based on my limited understanding).

Skinning/ deformation by bones does work for all body items.

Yes, hard armor should in theory not deform but in game-practice this is not achievable with the 'base' skeleton-weight system. Only some very advanced skeleton and deformation setup can mitigate this (which arma does not have).

22 hours ago, Johno89 said:

When i tried to add the arma man bones to it from the samples and apply the skin modifier it didnt work (but this most likely is because i was doing it wrong).

If you imported the skeleton.fbx from samples, this is not a skeleton 3dsmax will recognize. You need actual "Bone" objects. The arma skeleton import only gives you dummy objects. You need the rig from toadie, or kiory.

[Johno89 20]

Is this rig available to download or would i have to ask them? Btw the weighting in object builder failed miserably lol. Everything works accept the back off the clone armor. Even though i made all its verts blue, when the character crouches or lies down it deforms SO bad. 

[x3kj 1247]

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when the character crouches or lies down it deforms SO bad. 

this is why you need to tweak it with alot more controll and also preview the animation (unless you prefer to pack and start the game everytime... )

Yes toadies rig should be available somewhere, if not it won't hurt to ask.

[Macser 776]

From the looks of it, the model was either created with subdivision or sculpting. Is it very dense? That's something that would make the process very awkward.

 

 

Edit: 

Actually after looking at the full size image it doesn't look overly complex.

 

If you're agreeable I could apply some weights to it. I'd need a copy of the model in P3d format though. If you're interested, just send a PM.

[x3kj 1247]

if it is not optimized for ingame use, then yes it should be reduced before you go and weight it first, because it can be quite a bit of trial and error and labor intensive. I would also suggest finishing the UV and texture first

[Johno89 20]

Macser, what you see is the low poly model. For each component i would just start with a planar surface and start from there, creating new edges and so forth till the shape was created. I've tried to keep the poly count low, but when i triangulate it i have a total of 26,000 (please tell me this is ok for arma!!!). Thanks for the offer, i may take you up on it. But because I'm trying to learn I'm gonna try and complete it myself atm.

 

X3kj, yh i've started to create the uvs for the model, nice n easy compared to the horrors of weighting lol. 

[Macser 776]

I noticed the edges once I looked at the full size image.

 

I'm not modding for A3, so I stick to the subjects that are applicable to any of the titles in the series. Namely modeling, animation and sub sets of those. 26k sounds a little excessive just for the armour. But that's a personal opinion.

 

Maybe wait until you get a few more replies regarding that, before making any alterations. But in the meantime you could carry on and treat it as a learning experience.

 

I understand the desire to give it a go yourself. When you make progress you'll own it. But the offer stands.