This is really getting on my nerves. There are many tools that seem to convert to the unique format Deus Ex uses but none of them work properly!

I've made a first-person 'laser' weapon mesh in Milkshape 3D 1.8. Because I'm a complete amateur it's just some primitives bonded to the grip and arm of Glock.3d in the DeusExItems package. I'm just testing things out at this stage. I had enough trouble trying to rip the meshes from the Deus Ex assets; WOTgreal seems to be the only tool that works there.

Now, the only method that seems to actually get my model in the game to some workable extent is exporting it to Unreal .3d and then using Tack's unr2de.exe. I don't know what kind of code Steve used but it deforms my mesh out of all proportion! Does this have something to do with my mesh having too many polygons, or is the tool just rubbish?

http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/792/ihatedx3d.jpg

Other methods don't work: I tried exporting as a .lwo and then using Ion Storm's LWO23D.exe; to its credit it seems to preserve the proportions, at least in hexy's mesh viewer. When I import it in a package, however, I get a massive block covering half the screen. I tried exporting as a .3ds and using Tack's 3ds2de, but that tells me '# of meshes != # of vertices read', which is apparently something to do with my UV mapping, but when I use the 'out of sequence' error to stop it compiling groups in the mesh, it can compile each individual group seemingly perfectly!

Can someone tell me what the hell it is I need to be doing?!

Well, this forum ain't too busy, is it.

This topic suggests I shouldn't even be using Milkshape in the first place. I do have a copy of Blender, but just looking at it frightens me with how complex it is.

Oh, and using hexy's u2de3d.exe on my meshes makes them invisible for some reason.

Because it's a very old game and the engine is designed for professionals.

If you want a better answer, you'll just have to wait

A less condescending one would do.

HI I AM NEW AND ALSO AGRESSIVELY OVERCONFIDENT TO THE POINT OF OBNOXIOUSNESS, EVEN THO I AM ACTUALLY COMING HERE FOR HELP.

....

K, THIS FORUMS DEAD AND UR ALL NOOBS.





...right, now I've got that out of my system, can you export to .3ds? 3ds2de I can confirm works a treat for converting to DX format (it's what we use for HDTP).

Looks like you were so eager to "get that out of your system" that you neglected to read my post in full, eh? Can't you just drop the attitude? I'm not sure what I've done to deserve being so unwelcome.

When you say that you used .3ds for HDTP, does that mean you were also using 3ds Max to model? As I said I'm using Milkshape, so obviously there would be differences in how the file is presented to 3ds2de. The thread I linked to says Milkshape can't perform UV mapping (which is odd as I'm sure that's what the Texture Coordinate Editor does) which would explain the errors that I receive from the program.

If you don't use the other converter tools available, why not? Do you run into the same problems with them that I do?

Well, complaining that you hadn't had an immediate response to your question was a bad start, given that this is a 12 year old game and that this is a fairly underpopulated subforum.

Then jumping straight to the defensive when Jonas pointed this out.

And generally acting like the world owes you a favour.

It's...grating, is all. I mean, you're far from the worst: I've checked the forums on a monday after a weekend away and there have been posts that literally go
"HALP WAT HAPPEN WIT TIHS MODEL?"

then five minutes later

"HALP?"

then five minutes later

"NODOBY NOES?"

then five minutes later

"FUK U UR ALL NOOBS"

and they never return, so hey, at least you're still here and listening.

With forums (particularly old, established forums) it's generally best to think of them like a gentlemans' club or similar: everyone has their favourite armchair, and most people know most other peoples quirks and eccentricities, things are comfortable. Much like in a gentlemans' club, barging in and demanding prompt help will be met with distain and chortling, whereas asking and waiting is less likely to offend. Taking offence when people aren't even being dicks to you is particularly silly. I was being a dick, of course, but that's because I am a dick.

ANYWAY.

In my experience, 3ds2de is the only converter I've not experienced any jelly-effect or mesh-shearing artefacts with. Unr2de is particularly bad for the jelly-effect, as the mesh conversion really doesn't handle tweened animation terribly well.

Now you say you can export to .3ds, but what are you exporting? Are you just exporting the mesh, or the entire animated series? And if the whole series, how are the animframes numbered (a common source of out of sequence errors)? And does the entire mesh fall within the central bounding box? Do the UVmap coordinates touch or overrun the boundaries of the UVmapping space? And when you say "bonded to the grip and arm", does this mean you've just stuck extra meshes on and attached them, or have you properly merged them all into one self-contained mesh? You mention 'groups', but don't clarify what these are. You mention that you USE the out of sequence error to successfully compile, which sounds somewhat counterintuitive to me. And then you say it compiles perfectly under some situations.

So..I would need more information, and ideally some sort of explanation of milkshape-specific terminology, because yes, I've always used 3dsmax for modelling (or meshmaker, back when I was truly clueless) and animated 3ds files exported by 3dsmax work just fine as long as the frame numbering is correct and the UVmapping is correct and the mesh size is correct. ....Usually, anyway.

You're rather odd, and I'm going to ignore the first half of your post (as you're clearly in your favourite armchair).

Well it's good to hear that I can rely on 3ds2de if I can ever get it working.

I'm not at my other computer at the moment so for the moment I'll answer off the top of my head - and as I'm new to modelling (I didn't even know they were called 'meshes' until recently) some of your questions are new to me. There is no animation in this mesh (I just want to see it in the engine first, not even taking into account the fact attempting 3D animation for the first time is probably a hellish experience) so there is just a single base frame. I'm not sure where Milkshape's 'bounding box' is, or if it has one. I read somewhere to keep it within 128 units or the polygons would deform, but I didn't really pay much heed to this as my mesh is small enough not to matter. I just stuck it near the XYZ axis and hoped for the best. As for the UV mapping - I extracted WeaponHandsTex.pcx, edited it and imported it into Milkshape, and as soon as I did so it wrapped itself around the arm mesh that I had copied perfectly, so I haven't touched that part. I made my own generic grey texture (don't worry, it's 256px 8-bit indexed .pcx) and applied that to the grey body of the weapon; I think Milkshape just fitted it to the faces automatically, and as it looks the same all around I didn't change it. Finally the red barrel of the weapon I had to map manually, and I suppose it's possible, but unlikely, that some of its vertices could lie outside the texture coordinates - ether way I'll try discarding all the textures and running it through 3ds2de later and see if that makes a difference.



Not quite sure what you mean here, 'attach' and 'merge' sounds like the same thing. I copied the arm/grip mesh from Glock_*.3d and pasted it into my mesh. I positioned the top of the grip inside the primitive I used for the 'chamber' so there were no gaps, but I didn't link it to any vertices - is this what you are referring to? Surely every part of a mesh doesn't have to be connected to every other part - then you wouldn't able to animate things like the casing ejecting in the original Glock_a.3d.

I think 'Groups' in Milkshape are elements of a mesh that are grouped together and named for easier manipulation, and in addition textures are mapped to one group at a time. I don't know how you'd refer to them in other modellers. Apparently 3ds Max doesn't have groups, only multiple meshes. Nonetheless 3ds2de names each group as it is compiling, and if each group doesn't have a number at the end of its name, or isn't numbered in sequence, it delivers the 'out of sequence' error message. They definitely aren't animation frames though, Milkshape has a seek bar at the bottom that I haven't used yet. Maybe because 3ds can't handle groups, Milkshape exports groups to 3ds as individual... frames... of animation... aahhhh yes, that makes sense, that must be what's happening do you think? Presmably because the Milkshape exporter doesn't expect you to convert the file again immediately without opening it up in 3ds Max and turning those former groups into a single cohesive mesh.

(When I say that 3ds2de can compile each group perfectly if I skip individual groups with the 'out of sequence' error, that is me renaming a group to trigger the error on that particular group. The resulting file, when I open it in the Mesh Viewer, displays the group that I didn't skip, but only that particular group; the rest of the mesh is missing. I didn't actually try compiling it into my package and viewing it in-game, which with hindsight wasn't very smart of me.)

Sigh, this is all so complicated. Good thing we haven't begun to consider how the import UnrealScript might factor into this...

Ah, ok.

So, for a mesh to work in DX, it has to be ONE mesh. The vertices etc don't all need to connect in one contigous mass, as you noted (though incidentally, the ejected shell casings actually are separate actors, not part of the gun mesh -they're spawned on demand when it fires), but the whole thing needs to be one "mesh". If you're in 'select mesh' mode (rather than, say, select vertex or whatever) then clicking on any part of the mesh should select the entire thing.

For want of a better analogy, it's a bit like the layers system in photoshop: each mesh element (gun, your new barrel, your new grip) can be a separate layer while you're editing it (so they can be repositioned more easily, etc etc), but before you import it into DX, you need to merge everything down into a single layer. In modelling terms, a single mesh.

Animations, y'see, are stored as separate meshes (a mesh for each frame), so if the compiler sees multiple meshes in one file it assumes they're frames in an animation sequence. For this to work they also need to be sequentially numbered, hence the out of sequence errors you're seeing: this is the compiler getting confused by what it perceives as an incorrectly numbered animation sequence.

So you need to find whatever milkshape does to permanently attach your barrel and grip to the single gun frame you're working on so it becomes a single mesh. If it's a single mesh and within the right size boundaries for conversion (and hey, you can always shrink it right down just in case, since you can rescale during or after import) then it should import ok, even if the UVmapping isn't quite right.

Also, UVmapping is simply (more or less) a coordinate system telling the game how to wrap a texture around a mesh. It doesn't actually matter what the texture is (and indeed 3ds2de doesn't know or care -the texture is baked onto the mesh at import, not during conversion), so there's no need to extract and reapply the weaponhandstex. You've established that the UVmappings from the original mesh are preserved, so that's really all you need.

The other thing we'll then need to worry about is texture groups, but we'll worry about that as and when this stuff starts working.

Did I say casing? I think I meant the magazine in the reload animation. Seems a bit pointless to animate it as far down as it is though, considering you would never see it fall that far. Still, when I looked at the animation frames rendered in WOTgreal I'm pretty sure there are some shell casings coming off. When you saw they are spawned, are you talking about the ones that fall on the ground (which are obviously seperate meshes) or the ones that you actually see coming out of the chamber?

Anyway thanks, I'll see what I can do when I get back to Milkshape. I think I understand what you're saying about the UV mapping. How, though, is the data stored? Don't worry, I wasn't importing WeaponHandsTex into Milkshape with the idea that I had to, I just didn't think that UV mapping would have been copied with the mesh, so I would have to remap it. Ostensibly making the entire mesh part of one group in order to get 3ds2de to work properly would destroy the UV mapping, but if the file stores the UV coordinates for each individual vertices/face rather than each group, I can export and still have it all work. Is this what you mean? It would explain why WeaponHandsTex looked fine on the arm.

(Presumably I could skip all this hassle by tor- acquiring 3ds Max in the first place. That's probably the easiest and best long-term option, given Milkshape's simplicity. I hope it's not as scary as Blender.)

Oh, guess I was wrong. There aren't any casings in the mesh animation.

I got a friend of mine, Mr Bitt Torrent, to lend me his copy of 3ds Max 2010. And Milkshape can screw itself - this is clearly a hundred times better.

It does appear that Milkshape was exporting the Groups as 'different meshes' - I now understand what it was you were talking about, because each group appears to correspond to what is referred to in 3ds Max as an object. So going by what you were saying, all these objects need to merged into one before saving and running through 3ds2de.

My frustration was mounting with regards to finding out how manual UV mapping works in this program, but I just found the 'Unwrap UVW' Modifier. I'll have a read of this tutorial...

The mapping is all sorted, but I'm having the same problems with 3ds2de. The objects have to be numbered in sequence, and once I do so, it throws out the '# map coordinates != # vertices read' error. But I used the automatic mapping for the body and Ion Storm's mapping for the arm, so it's just my manual mapping on the barrel that could be at fault, and it definitely isn't - I made sure of that in the editor.

I take it I was wrong before about objects being synonymous with meshes. Each object can only have one material applied to it, right? So if I combine all the objects into one it would be impossible to texture them properly.

Have I forgotten to uncheck a box somewhere, or do I really have to mirror my meshes in 3ds Max before I export them?

You can mirror (or unmirror, really) at import, just add the UNMIRROR=1 to the end of the first import line.

For importing, if you're still getting out of sequence errors and it's not an animated mesh, then you're probably importing multiple meshes. You can happily have many different matIDs on one mesh, though, so don't worry about texturing. When you have one mesh selected, click 'attach', and attach your other meshes, and if the two meshes have different materials, you should get a prompt about mapping mesh to material or material to mesh, or something. Pick the second option, anyhow. This will give you two material IDs on one mesh, which is perfectly acceptable (and indeed, necessary for multiple textures).

3dsMax takes fucking ages to get the hang of, and I still have no idea what I'm doing most of the time.