Convert OFP faces to ArmA

[.kju 3239]

I am about to convert the CWC campaign to ArmA.

It would be nice to have the face textures of the characters

available for it. If you have some experience with faces in ArmA -

do you think its possible to convert them?

Thanks for your response!

[Panda-PL- 0]

Yes Q.

The mapping is different but...

You'd need to export both ArmA and OFP heads to some commonly used 3D art format and then bake the texture from OFP to ArmA head.

The old O2 exe had export option.

[sparky 0]

OFP and ArmA have different UV Mapping for head.

OFP UV Head Mapping

ArmA UV Head Mapping

but if you manage to fic a head texture into ArmA map then your face texture should OK.

In order to do this.

Open the ArmA soldier from BI Models (MLODS)

go to the UV Filter->Filter By Main Texture and select the hhl_22_co.paa.

After go to UV Editor->Export

in the Export Pop-up, in export options check them all. select as export EMF format or WMF, on name remove the extension and put EMF or WMF depending on what you have chhosen (i use EMF).

in dimensions put 1024X1024.

and export it.

A problem that you may have, is that Photoshop doesn't open the EMF or WMF Files at least mine.

so you need to go through a more step, but that step can be easy, if you have MS Office from 2003 Version and Above the Picture Manager can open them and exports them into JPG n order to view them in Photoshop.

After you have open the EMF or WMF texture in Picture Manageer go to File->Export

put your desiee output name, select JPG file extension, and choose "Keep original size", click export and you're done.

OK, open it in Photoshop you probably notice that Picture Manager has changed the dimensions into 800X800, but that is nothing that you can worry about, since this dimensions are square. Smply go image->image size and put 1024 for width and 1024 for height.

you're done, now the hard part has come, try to ft an oFP face into this UV Map layout...

[.kju 3239]

Sincere thanks to you XSparky and Panda[PL]!

Excellent info!

As supplement the info from Balschoiw:

OFP and Arma use different methods of face texturing

as you can see here:

OFP

Arma

It will certainly take some time to transfer OFP faces to Arma as it´s not that easy to do it right but if you find someone like wipman who has quite some routine in creating faces for Arma it should be doable.

and the great details from wipman:

Quote[/b] ]Hi there man, well... it'll be possible... but not to get a good quality

after the conversion, sadly you'll have to scale up the face's front

side and get ridd of the ears/sides and use the current ArmA's

face sides/ears; so ya'll have to fade out the OFP face over an

ArmA's face that matches the skin and hair colour, and this is

hard to get and will not always be possible i think; also... the

bigger problem is the nose, that'll be i think the hardest thing to

adaptate or reform, and again... nothin' guarantees the success.

Let's C ya man

[ricki 0]

if u need help skype me

[vektorboson 8]

Hey Q,

a better solution would be to take the Faces from HYK's US Soldier's addon; he transformed the original BIS faces to the Llauma-head model, which has a very similar texture mapping.

[max power 21]

If you know anyone with Maya, Maya has a couple of tools that can transfer maps in object, uv, or world space.  It would be very easy to warp these maps exactly to fit the arma unwrap through a process of ray sampling.

[.kju 3239]

Thanks ricki, vektorboson and plaintiff1!

I will come back to this next week.

[blackjack-VS- 0]

Quote[/b] ]If you know anyone with Maya, Maya has a couple of tools that can transfer maps in object, uv, or world space.  It would be very easy to warp these maps exactly to fit the arma unwrap through a process of ray sampling.

I was bugged with this tip from plaintiff1, because honestly i didn't knew you can do it.

So what we're talking here is :

Mesh from ofp with ofp UV layout- Lets call it MeshA with UV(A)

Mesh from Arma with diferent UV Layour- call it MeshB with UV(B).

What i can easly do in XSI is grab a MeshA with UV(A) and render the texture to a new texture that uses UV(B).

Now if you have a MeshA and a different MeshB, i really don't how can it be done. You have any tut on that for Maya?

To solve Q issue, maybe i would grab an ofp head, then create a new uv map that fits the best possible to arma's uv layout.

Then i would render the old ofp texture to a new arma texture.

But just wondering here...all the normal/specular maps that Arma models use would still be missing right? Or you thinking on manually do that?  

[.kju 3239]

While I am almost zero into modeling and such, I am unsure if

that is necessary. I have yet to see normal/specular maps for

face textures.

Well it is only about assigning a face textures with setFace

script command.

So it should not involve modifying the soldier model itself, yet only

get the texture of the face in the new proportions.

From what I understand one can use 3rd party software to change

the UV mapping from one model to another and getting by that

the correct face texture...

or its complete nonsense what I am thinking.

Edit: Maybe some clarification. It is NOT about converting ALL

OFP faces, yet only the ones from the CWC and Res campaigns'

main characters.

[max power 21]

@ July 07 2008,15:27)]

Quote[/b] ]If you know anyone with Maya, Maya has a couple of tools that can transfer maps in object, uv, or world space.  It would be very easy to warp these maps exactly to fit the arma unwrap through a process of ray sampling.

I was bugged with this tip from plaintiff1, because honestly i didn't knew you can do it.

So what we're talking here is :

Mesh from ofp with ofp UV layout- Lets call it MeshA with UV(A)

Mesh from Arma with diferent UV Layour- call it MeshB with UV(B).

What i can easly do in XSI is grab a MeshA with UV(A) and render the texture to a new texture that uses UV(B).

Now if you have a MeshA and a different MeshB, i really don't how can it be done. You have any tut on that for Maya?

To solve Q issue, maybe i would grab an ofp head, then create a new uv map that fits the best possible to arma's uv layout.

Then i would render the old ofp texture to a new arma texture.

But just wondering here...all the normal/specular maps that Arma models use would still be missing right? Or you thinking on manually do that?  

XSI can do it to with a modifier that they call Ultimapper.  The Ultimapper works well but I think that for Q's purposes, Maya's Transfer Maps tool would be a bit more powerful.

You don't need a tutorial for either function.  Ultimapper is located in Get\Property\Ultimapper in XSI and Transfer Maps is in the Render menu set under Lighting, I believe.

Why did this bug you?  It seems a strange thing to be bothered about.

For the normal and specular maps for these faces you will have to build them manually since those assets don't exist in ofp. You can transfer other maps a number of ways but I think that by far the simplest way would simply be to alter the shader tree so each map has its turn being the diffuse map and redoing the process.

[blackjack-VS- 0]

Maybe "bug me" isn't the best adjective. What i mean is that I'm not understanding how to transfer the texture from one mesh to another totally different mesh.

I work with XSI, so i'm familiar with Ultimapper ( but maybe not enough) and from what i remember the Ultimaper purpose is to transfer detail from one high mesh to its equivalent low res mesh. So the topology is always very similar, which i suppose it doesn't happen between an Arma head and OFP head (maybe they are, never compared).

My workflow is to grab a low res model, then make a clone of it and start modeling all the details at will. When happy you make a nice uv map to the low rez model, and overlap the 2 models on each other.

Now with ultimapper, it will create all the diffuse/normal/ao from the high rez to the low rez mesh.

I never had great results if the topology isn't very similar,so that was the reason that made ask how to do it, not saying it's impossible or want to sound that I'm a xsi guru.

Thanks for the answer anyway.

[max power 21]

Oh it is more than possible. The purpose of the tool is to transfer information from one mesh to another. I forget whether ultimapper has an option to transfer in world space, but that would be the easiest as you can match up the corresponding details in world space and let the rays do the rest.

For instance, you can make a 3d chainlink fence plane by making one segment of the chainlink fence in 3d, duplicating it until you have some segment of fence. Then create a plane of a size that will ensure a repeating fence pattern, place the 3d fence over the plane, and transfer albedo/diffuse, normal, A/O or any maps along the face normal. There you have the basis for a number of different maps with an alpha. This is transferring one mesh to another very different mesh.

In the case where the two meshes do not line up in a pleasing way, that is easily fixable with some basic image editing, such as using the lattice function in PS. If the nose of the character spills out a little bit onto his lip, for instance, the lattice or the liquify tools would do an adequate job of tweaking the placement of these details.

If someone can provide me with some files from both games I can do a trial run to see if there are any problems, and I can document the process.

[blackjack-VS- 0]

Thanks for the feedback, I remember a pdf file from Softimage showing the power of Ultimapper, and it was something similar to what you described. The alpha thing is quite impressive indeed, and the results are usually impressive to.

What you also confirmed me is that isn't any magic button that does the trick just like that...There's always a lot of manual tweaking to finally adjust the distortions, but yes it works that way.

I just have the arma bis soldier loaded, but i'm sure i have the ofp head somewhere to...it would be interesting to try i guess.

Thanks for the explanation!

[max power 21]

@ July 08 2008,01:53)]Thanks for the feedback, I remember a pdf file from Softimage showing the power of Ultimapper, and it was something similar to what you described. The alpha thing is quite impressive indeed, and the results are usually impressive to.

What you also confirmed me is that isn't any magic button that does the trick just like that...There's always a lot of manual tweaking to finally adjust the distortions, but yes it works that way.

I just have the arma bis soldier loaded, but i'm sure i have the ofp head somewhere to...it would be interesting to try i guess.

Thanks for the explanation!

Oh yes, there is usually some tweaking involved but sometimes you get lucky. There might not be much tweaking. It depends on how closely the meshes go together. If they are pretty close and you go by face normal, I think that the results will be quite good without much cleanup.