ODOL Converting a soldier to MLOD

[PRiME 1]

So I converted these desert soldiers to MLOD so I could add in pistol proxies but the damn things loose there textures completely,.

Is there a pathfix I need to do and if so how do I go about doing it?

I'm hoping I don't need to re-add every texture as that will take me weeks.

[Planck 1]

If you hold the Ctrl key whilst double left clicking a texture, all faces that are mapped to that texture will be selected.

All you need to do then is to go to Face Properties and edit the texture path for all those faces.

You will need to do this for each texture AND for each Resolution LOD.

Planck

[PRiME 1]

Ok well after looking at the faces path etc they all appear to be correct, but if I save the MlOD then try using it ingame the soldiers come up white.

EDIT: Wait they come up with half the texture file name cut off,

sttdesertsoldiersw\sttdes003mc_t

should be

sttdesertsoldiersw\sttdes003mc_tankistaw2.paa

whats going on here?

[feersum.endjinn 6]

MLOD can only have texture path that are under 32 characters. As many earlier texture swap addons were done using hex editors, they break this limit which results in "illegal" texture paths when converted to MLOD.

Since STT's desert soldiers are just retextured BIS units, you can take BIS soldier model from dta\hwtl\data3d.pbo and replace it's textures.

You better use textures and models from DTA\HWTL directory because it has version which all those 20+ textures combined to single 1024x1024 texture, which gives better performance...

[PRiME 1]

Perhaps, But im simple just adding handguns to these existing units for a package im making,.

I know someone has done it before but the files have since gone into the big abyss so I will do it myself.

EDIT: Well it will take too long anyway as the names are all the same due to this dos cutoff thing, maybe oneday someone will make a non 32charactor limited one.. tell then I will just put up with the soldiers shooting out of there chest.

[feersum.endjinn 6]

Above mentioned way is how I converted old STT units to have proper pistol proxies for FDFmod desert pack.

Just convert all textures to .tga and copypaste them on top of BIS textures.. IMHO it is easier than positioning proxies which is always shitty job

[PRiME 1]

positioning not needed, I copy paste from another model onto the STT one, easy as PIE.

Anyway I wanted to fix the textures up but I can't determine what belongs to what part of thesoldier as there names colide,. Damn Shame. If only there was a better ODOL convertor

[feersum.endjinn 6]

It is as good as it gets. You can not convert those hex edited files, there is fixed length field in MLOD file and it will only fit 31 characters there (32 total, but last byte is end of string marker). If texture name were longer, it would overwrite critical data, as number of vertices in face.

What you need to do is to hex edit those texture names to 31 chars or less and then convert that model to MLOD.

[PRiME 1]

So I can see those texture name referrences in the ODOL if I hex edit it?

[Planck 1]

Yes viewing an ODOL model in a hex editor you should be able to see the texture paths ok.

Do a search in the hex editor for 'data'........presuming the model was using textures from the Data.pbo.

Planck

[PRiME 1]

yep been doing that, been using the ultra edit, I replace the names with something shorter.. First trial had some weird effect as the soldiers were running on the spot :o

So should I replace the texture name and leave SPACES (empty data) for the letters that are removed

Im just unsure because I tried doing replacing but it reshuffled the data and Im thinking that somehow can screw with the rest of the code?