Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005 10:45 am
OK time to bring this back again.
I am working on making a dinosaur known as Segnosaurus, based off of Gallimimus. To start, I brought the Galli into TPDC successfully (thanks Reb ) and Saved his .wif (weights information file) to be used later. Then I imported a .3ds export of Galli into Max, and proceeded to alter his mesh in slight ways (claws different shape, arms in new position, neck shorther, head rotated and non-uniform scaled). No modifications were made outside of the vertex sub-object level in the editable mesh. After this I created new maps for the Segno and created a new material with the 4 ID's (I've found in the past that the materials of .3ds imports can't be used even if updated with correct texture names, geomadd gives some kind of strange error), which used new maps I just made (I'll reveal the new look at a later time ). Now I exported this mesh and brought it into TPDC. First off, it gave me 4 error messages saying the texture path is unreachable or w/e. I've come to expect this from TPDC and I know it's got something buggy with it because those textures work fine with other non-dino meshes going through geomadd. So textures don't show up in TPDC if they're not original/TC dinos... no biggie. Anyways the first problem was this:
Now we've all seen this before numerous times.... >_> I took one of the suggestions I hadn't done for Cerato yet and combined the mesh with that of Gallimimus, also moving the mesh of the Segno so that it's pivot point was now centered. See I'm not sure why TPDC does this... the pivot point of the Galli mesh from TPDC is not centered, yet TPDC needs it to be in order for it to work. Not 100% sure why... I would think that the galli pivot is off towards the back because galli doesn't use the rear tail joint(s). Hmmmm anyway... This corrected the position problem (yay!!) but gave me an error (similar to the next one so I won't show a pic yet) that seemed to idicate the vertex numbers were now changed. I realized this made sence because I had attached it to the galli mesh and then deleted the galli. It wasn't that hard to redo the process w/out attaching the mesh, and mangaged to maintain the correct position in TPDC (whew) but the same problem was evident:
I figured out the purple part means areas of the mesh which have assigned verticies. I almost started this post at that poing but then I realized... I always assumed the dinos' meshes were exploded, not sure why maybe just because that's how they always came out in Max (I am going to try tpm import sometime soon maybe this will help that issue). Now I know better thanks to this, and went back to weld all the Segno's verts (oh forgot to mension, I renamed the Sengo mesh back to Galli cause TPDC was bugging me about the mesh having a diff name from the .wif file). This wasn't easy because of how tiny the mesh was, 'specially at the mouth... Figured a way around that, and finally got him with all the verts welded and smooth into TPDC, aaaaand:
Hmmmm he looks cool there but, I got this error message which I had gotten before still:
"Number of vertices of current mesh does not match weight information file."
Funny thing is, the whole mesh is purple which would seem to indicate there WERE the same number of verticies, and the whole mesh was assigned... Also I used the option Assign by Index (using Assign by Position doesn't seem to assign anything). As you can kind of see here, the verticies are assigned to the wrong joints. Not just that, but SHADOW joints are being given SKIN verticies. What's up with that? (a note, the raptorB shadow mesh seems to be fine)
Soooo my points are: *What am I still doing wrong? *How can making a dino be this hard??? *How can saving .wif files possibly be of any use to anybody if this is what happens?
I could go and, worst case scenario, assign all the verts myself... But if that's what it takes then we should just remove this wif feature from TPDC altogether.
I am working on making a dinosaur known as Segnosaurus, based off of Gallimimus. To start, I brought the Galli into TPDC successfully (thanks Reb ) and Saved his .wif (weights information file) to be used later. Then I imported a .3ds export of Galli into Max, and proceeded to alter his mesh in slight ways (claws different shape, arms in new position, neck shorther, head rotated and non-uniform scaled). No modifications were made outside of the vertex sub-object level in the editable mesh. After this I created new maps for the Segno and created a new material with the 4 ID's (I've found in the past that the materials of .3ds imports can't be used even if updated with correct texture names, geomadd gives some kind of strange error), which used new maps I just made (I'll reveal the new look at a later time ). Now I exported this mesh and brought it into TPDC. First off, it gave me 4 error messages saying the texture path is unreachable or w/e. I've come to expect this from TPDC and I know it's got something buggy with it because those textures work fine with other non-dino meshes going through geomadd. So textures don't show up in TPDC if they're not original/TC dinos... no biggie. Anyways the first problem was this:
Now we've all seen this before numerous times.... >_> I took one of the suggestions I hadn't done for Cerato yet and combined the mesh with that of Gallimimus, also moving the mesh of the Segno so that it's pivot point was now centered. See I'm not sure why TPDC does this... the pivot point of the Galli mesh from TPDC is not centered, yet TPDC needs it to be in order for it to work. Not 100% sure why... I would think that the galli pivot is off towards the back because galli doesn't use the rear tail joint(s). Hmmmm anyway... This corrected the position problem (yay!!) but gave me an error (similar to the next one so I won't show a pic yet) that seemed to idicate the vertex numbers were now changed. I realized this made sence because I had attached it to the galli mesh and then deleted the galli. It wasn't that hard to redo the process w/out attaching the mesh, and mangaged to maintain the correct position in TPDC (whew) but the same problem was evident:
I figured out the purple part means areas of the mesh which have assigned verticies. I almost started this post at that poing but then I realized... I always assumed the dinos' meshes were exploded, not sure why maybe just because that's how they always came out in Max (I am going to try tpm import sometime soon maybe this will help that issue). Now I know better thanks to this, and went back to weld all the Segno's verts (oh forgot to mension, I renamed the Sengo mesh back to Galli cause TPDC was bugging me about the mesh having a diff name from the .wif file). This wasn't easy because of how tiny the mesh was, 'specially at the mouth... Figured a way around that, and finally got him with all the verts welded and smooth into TPDC, aaaaand:
Hmmmm he looks cool there but, I got this error message which I had gotten before still:
"Number of vertices of current mesh does not match weight information file."
Funny thing is, the whole mesh is purple which would seem to indicate there WERE the same number of verticies, and the whole mesh was assigned... Also I used the option Assign by Index (using Assign by Position doesn't seem to assign anything). As you can kind of see here, the verticies are assigned to the wrong joints. Not just that, but SHADOW joints are being given SKIN verticies. What's up with that? (a note, the raptorB shadow mesh seems to be fine)
Soooo my points are: *What am I still doing wrong? *How can making a dino be this hard??? *How can saving .wif files possibly be of any use to anybody if this is what happens?
I could go and, worst case scenario, assign all the verts myself... But if that's what it takes then we should just remove this wif feature from TPDC altogether.