Topic: x2mdl/x2mm3d download (2021) (Read 23084 times)

Holey Moley · « **Reply #15 on:** March 18, 2022, 10:33:47 AM »

MM3D upgrade

First, off-topic, I've uploaded a minor SomEx.dll patch just now that fixes a problem with scaling animations. I'm not going to announce it as usual.

The past few days I've been working upgrading MM3D's modeling capabilities by addressing several of its tools that original author neglected to add texture map support to. That made these tools pretty much useless since texture mapping is the most difficult thing, and it's not worth ruining your texture map to edit a model.

I've mostly been using it for animation, but lately I've not used Blender since I started the new round of work on my KF2 project. I have been making some edits, but I'd hit enough walls that I decided it was time to roll up my sleeves and do something about this. The demo and source code for this is on Github.com. I really enjoy working on MM3D this way. I've been pleased with my decision to take it under my wing.

Anyway, this is just my activities of late. Hopefully I will be back to working on KF2's NPCs by this time tomorrow.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #16 on:** April 02, 2022, 12:12:09 AM »

MM3D upgrade

I've been working on the UV editor part of the MM3D editor a lot in the past few days... all day yesterday. I've published the work on its Github site. It includes snapping and other new editing commands and buttons. I have to work on a pivot system like Blender's "3D cursor" to make it a little better, but it's pretty competent at this point. I had to add a vertex (UV) snapping system to edit KF2's ghost the other day. Yesterday I worked on snapping to pixels and polish. There's considerable hotkey remapping, so always delete your key binding config file to restore to the latest default.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #17 on:** April 09, 2022, 07:04:41 AM »

Quote

4/9/2022: KF2-DATA-BACKUP.zip is art from my KF2 project for anyone who's asked for KF2 models in the past. Unfortunately the textures are quite dim. This is how they are on the game disc. You'll just have to increase lighting in your software or process them with image editing software one by one to your need.

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/KF2-DATA-BACKUP.zip

Holey Moley · « **Reply #18 on:** April 16, 2022, 11:07:34 PM »

checking in

In the past 2 or 3 days I've been taking on SOM's UV animation problems. There are 3 problems I hope to tackle. The first is control over sky animations. The second is animating NPCs and monsters. The third is animating MDL files in general, which includes NPCs and monsters, but the real problem is just the inability to mix regular animations with UV animations. A fourth is animating level geometry. Unfortunately that one's going to have to wait. There is a solution for that already, but it's not ideal.

Unfortunately I expect this to be a week long project, if not 2 weeks, since it will also include realizing the animations in the modeling software, in the player, and converting the art data into runtime data. It's not exactly what I expected to be working on right this moment, but it seems to be the right time to do this.

The first problem I faced was how to wedge this into the modeling software UI. UV animation like this is pretty obscure, and the software already has virtually every key on the keyboard mapped to hotkey shortcuts. So it didn't make sense to make a dedicated facility for it, and I didn't want to tack it onto the animation facilities either.

Animating a UV map is already pretty odd since there's not really anything to grab onto. You could cook something up, but it would feel a little pointless and frictionless. I wanted to add a new category for more obscure video game like needs. I.e. stuff 3D modelers don't usually think about, but games need. The more low-fi the game, the more obscure the need. I had to brainstorm what to call it. I started out with something like Effects, but it didn't map nicely to a shortcut. Then I thought maybe Qualities, but I didn't like using Q as a shortcut... that area on the keyboard already has a certain character that didn't quite fit for opening a window up, lest you do so by mistake. Then I hit on Utilities, that was just perfect. That made me excited for the project. The U key was wide open (being quite out of reach) and "utility" exactly captures the meaning I'm going for. I'm surprised I didn't have to resort to a thesaurus. It did take me a few days to come up with that.

It's good for work when everything seems to click into place like destiny. Also there's an existing "Meta Data" system that didn't have a good shortcut assignment. But I changed the wording to User Data (better IMO) and that was perfect as a double (Ctrl+U) for the U key. Especially because this new Utilities layout is identical to the User Data window's, even going so far as to reuse the same code and source file.

The first day of real work was a hurricane of just laying down infrastructure. Because of the extra level of indirection caused by establishing a category (Utilities) there was extra work and abstract things to consider. It's a modular system, ideally it would be nice to integrate plugins into it. It's like meta data, only more than just little textual notes. (Sometimes games can get some mileage from such notes, but SOM doesn't. It can also be nice for adding contact information if you want.)

I think somewhere down the road will be some "utilities" for fine-grain manipulation of lighting "surface normals". That's something you can't always get out of 3D editors which low-poly games can really benefit from. I already have a problem with lighting on KF2's dead soldier (I call him star man) because this software calculates soft normals differently from KF2's. It's more correct, but the slight difference on low-poly models makes the soldier's face look pretty bad in some locations. That could be fixed by having any of a number of facilities, including storing imported normals, alternative ways of calculating them, or full customization... as in directly specifying normals. Anyway, the thinking is if you keep adding obscure possibilities like this in a disorganized way then the software's high traffic interface would be compromised.

How the Utility system differs is it pulls out a side panel that's tailored to the utility type itself. When I was done working yesterday I wasn't too happy with the layout. But I had some ideas this morning and now it's all come out quite nice by the end of the day. Sometimes doing layouts with C++ seems to go slow. Plus I've been improving the UI software itself somewhat today. One day I'd like to apply it to SOM... like for Apple or Linux systems, where Windows won't fly. The right panel is still a little incomplete. It's going to have full key-frames for a texture matrix... but I don't expect I will initially enable all of that for SOM's MDO file format. I'll leave it open for expansion if not. For modeling software it would be too odd to restrict it to SOM's use case.

In the screenshot the Detach button lets the right panel come off in order to be able to work with the main window at the same time. This changes the undo/redo model somewhat since every change then becomes an undo sequence point, and there's no Cancel button. But really there just needs to be a way to get to its panel in the first place. Programming UI stuff for editors takes days too. It looks simple but it may be more complicated than the actual animation logic... especially if it's approached as an art form in its own right.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #19 on:** June 06, 2022, 09:00:29 PM »

MM3D upgrade

More info: https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/issues/1#issuecomment-1147825671

Download: https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/download/win32-dec-2021/mm3d-portable.zip

Edited: A lot of hotkeys are remapped. The Help->About menu now has a "Tip" to clear out the keycfg.ini file, and the hyperlink to its URL should now open it into your text editor that's assigned to the INI extension.

This is a substantial upgrade I've been focusing on pretty much since the new KF2 demo I published on the eve of May 1. I don't like the thought that it took me a month to prepare this, but I don't know what else I've been doing.

This model editor is becoming more mature. I'm happy with how the menus and hotkeys have turned out. The main focus of this update is a graph based animation editor, but it's really pretty basic. Maybe the extras are more impressive, but it was the editor that took up the bulk of my time preparing this. There's just so many little details involved that you wouldn't think of.

Holey Moley · « **Reply #20 on:** June 09, 2022, 04:56:34 PM »

Fix

http://www.swordofmoonlight.net/holy/x2mdl.zip
http://csv.swordofmoonlight.net/x2mdl.dll/1.0.0.2.zip

I've updated the x2mdl.exe file in these to fix a bug when converting MDL files into MM3D files that outputs 1 pixel textures if the files already exist.

Unrelated, FWIW I've also updated https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases to fix glitches in the scroll bar pixels, and a couple other minor bugs. I've also added a mantis-model.zip file in order to supply a test model to play with. It's the same as SOM's DATA/ENEMY/MODEL/E019.MM3D file.

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x2mdl/x2mm3d download (2021)