Metasequoia modeler tutorials and Keynote translated plugins

[dmpdesign]

One of the modellers I work with uses Blender, and yes it is quite powerful, but I do have to agree learning to use it is much more difficult...I die a little inside every time I am asked to paint a texture onto a model done in Blender lol.

[Verdite]

@John Thats not my dragon :) I just wanted to post a good image of how the armatures are setup in the new Blender. I didnt post anything on how weight painting is handled though so You can click here to see how it was handled in 2.49

I'm looking forward to finishing my project so I can 'doss' and create some interesting high poly meshes in blender. Sculpting in Blender is amazing.

@s I never had a problem exporting the direct x animations from 2.49b I havent tried in 2.70. Welcome to the forum by the way ‎ 

@Lurietchi I was completely the same when I started with 3D, meta is great for beginners with its easy interface but also great for pros, if you dont mind not taking shortcuts to achieve great results. Meta is like an older traditional modeling program, it might be behind a little compared to maya, blender etc but a skilled modeler can use it.

[Lurietchi]

@Verdite
That's good to know , actually I tried 3D max , blender , meta and some other not very famous programs like poser and DAZ , but meta was the only one that I liked , maybe it's as you said it's easy for a beginners .
I still don't know too much about the program itself , but if it's that good I guess I will use it forever as my main 3D program ~

[Smittiox]

Hey folks ! Been quite a while since I've posted. Hope everyone is doing well, or at least well enough :) Been looking in now n then on the Rathmor progress. WoW doesn't do it justice but .. WoW ! ‎  Nice work Man !!!

Been fooling around with transparent objects and .MDL files. I understand with making a transparent .MDL, It's all or nothing but I can't seem to figure out how to do it. I read elsewhere the transparency has to be stated in Meta. I've nearly worn out my alpha and diffuse sliders, tried covering in a texture , trying without textures, covered in just vertex colors etc to no avail :P. I'm thinking/hoping it's just a setting I'm overlooking somewhere in Meta. Also I'm assuming it will work for Objects too like I've read it will with Enemies and if so, possibly even Magic projectile models ? Also thought it may be something I might have to hex edit in or out like a transparency on and off byte , bit . chomp ... whatever lol

My goal was to make a lamp with a flame on top with a glass see through part on a solid frame which I can achieve partly in .MDO (flame at the bottom)and partly with .MDL (no or full transparency). Making the object an MDO then putting a 'flame object' on top works fine though. Also I could save the file in meta below the surface since the flame defaults to 0,0,0 then set the Y up in the map editor. works but feels like cheating without actually figuring it out :P

In the process I'd gotten an idea for a fully transparent skull enemy with a flame in the middle to guard whatever secret goodie the player is going for. The rough test looks more like an ice cube though :P ‎  Any help would be greatly appreciated ‎ 

As far as flamed objects in general, I'd been saving my .X file as animated X. can't get cpgen to drop a file so the flame knows where to go if I save in .X retained mode. Kind of pointless to have a bone and 1 frame of animation in there when it does nothing but get cpgen to work unless theres a better way. Also I dunno how bad that taxes resources either in case you had a lot of them.

Speaking of having lots of objects taxing things, I read elsewhere about billboarding. I found the spot in the obj prf's to turn it on and off. its at line 00000030 / 0E --- 00 is off 01 is on. If this is old news I'm sorry, new to me ‎ 

P.S. sorry if I should have posted in another thread for modeling but since I'm under the impression the transparency setting I'm trying to find is in meta I figured I'd post it here.

[Verdite]

Really appreciate the comment on my work Smittiox, stay tuned, it'll be released hopefully this weekend.

Speaking of having lots of objects taxing things, I read elsewhere about billboarding. I found the spot in the obj prf's to turn it on and off. its at line 00000030 / 0E --- 00 is off 01 is on. If this is old news I'm sorry, new to me

... ............................................ ............................. All I can say is thank you, very much. We've been trying to figure this out for ages. I already gave up on some of my flame sprite ideas, but now I have the know, I may use it in the future.



To get transparency, you need the latest mdl converter, and alpha in your texture. So you'l select a part of the texture that you want to have transparency, then (if using GIMP) go to colors > color to alpha. My advice is to desaturate the texture (colors > desaturate, gray / middle slider usually works well) then colourise it (colors > colorize) to get a good transparency map ‎ 

Incase you don't know, make sure the texture is 256x256 for smaller objects. The mdl converter handles 3x 256x256, but you can up the scale (to 2048x2048) for larger models in one texture alone, providing you use the prf editor and an external texture command in the .prf file.

The latest .prf editor comes with an option for setting 'lamps' along with flame animations and loop timing ‎ 

[Smittiox]

Thanks for the quick reply and you're very welcome man ‎ 

‎  What I did was put a few swords into the obj folder from the item folder like I read Tom did and threw em in a test area to see what they did. Then I compared the prf's with the altar object. I noticed on the right side of the hex editor a few symbols ( > Z o ) stayed the same between the swords so I tried editing them into the altar prf manually but got nothing. ‎  Then I grabbed the dagger prf since it was the least complicated looking and noticed that little 0 turning to one as I flipped back n forth between files so I changed (guessed) it in the altar prf to a 1 and voila, it worked !!

‎  Again happy to give back something here ‎  Actually I oughtta put up the 'flame object' files in the addon thread. Not much but something to play with. Put an independent flame /lamp object anywhere you want. the flame size increases and decreases with the size of the object too :) kindof and unexpected added bonus. figured the flame would stay the same size. And yeah the new prf editor John put together is great. kinda where the ideas started flowing from once I saw the extra tools and settings :) Thanks John !!. Had some fun with the cp green setting for the enemies but could only get one flame. tried putting 4 green 0 cp's on a single object but only got one flame. mabey only good for custom enemies ? anyhoo, had 4 cloth skeletons roaming around with flames in different places :P

I'm gonna get crackin with the info you gave me Ben , Thanks a load , been drivin me batty lol. kinda thought it may have something to do with textures since all the untextured tests just came out white. As far as I know I have the latest MDL converter .. 1.0 , the one at holy's site at the top of the post. let ya know what happens ‎ 

I'll keep checkin in for the masterpiece release ‎  Again , Thanks for the info man

(bah, just got a call. gotta help a neighbor haul some mattresses. have truck will travel I guess)

[HwitVlf]

Wow! I didn't know anyone else besides Ben even knew what a CP triangle was much less actually working with them :) Neat!. Thanks for finding the bilboard location. I'll try to add support for that to the PRF editor when I get time.

I don't think the flame location in MDOs has anything to do with a CP triangle. It's location is set by a value in each MDO. x2mdo just zeros it out normally so flames start at XYZ=0 by default. I wouldn't be surprised in x2mdo.exe supports a command line switch to set the flame location, but nothing was mentioned in the tools readme.

The location is set by three 4-byte long floating point values written backwards at around 0x28 in the MDO (hows that for a mouth full ‎  ). BUT, the 0x28 location is NOT constant. It varies depending on the header size. In the MDOs I've looked the flame location starts in a blank area 16 bytes after the value 803f. ‎  On lamp MDOs, the Y value is not blank of course.

If you're not familiar with floating point values, they're just the way a computer writes numbers with a decimal point. So 1.0 becomes 0x3f80 or as written in SoM 0x803F. You can probably find an online floating point converter easily- the distance is in SoM 'meters', so 2m = one map Piece.

So to make a lamp with a solid base and clear glass top, I think you would make a non animated model with 2 textures. The transparent texture wouldcover the glass and have an adjusted alpha of emission. If I remember correctly, emission makes the object see-trough and bright like glowing. Then after converting to MDO, edit the flame height in a hex editor.

Ha, skeleton on fire. Reminds me of joking about how dumb the genetically altered super soldiers in Metal Gear Solid were. "Huh! What was that noise!" as you shoot a bullet 2 inches from their head. In this case, "Huh!? What was that smell?"

[Smittiox]

Hey ! Thanks for the Mdo info man :) I'll mess with that some tonight. better to have it all in one package than two eh ?
‎  No problem on the billboard tag. I ‎  kinda just stumbled onto it really :P. almost didn't notice the number changing. ‎ 

‎  Been getting back into SOM lately trying to get the noggin wrapped around the CP functions and getting into the animation end of things . Guess I could have posted more often lol. been a lurker ‎  ‎ 

‎  Was reading up on the bone constraint info you guys posted up. Got a handle on it to an extent I guess but the info in the bump setting of the materials looks kinda hairy. ‎  ‎  ‎ 
‎  Playing around with a skull off one of the stock skeletons making it fly with a flapping jaw. Got it working but the preview in the SOM parameter editor has the jaw buried in the skull for some reason :P Looks that way in SOMIMP too before you hit play. Think I have the bones set up wrong mabey.

‎  Lol yeah, the metal gear soldiers were a bunch of numbskulls lol. kinda like these guys ‎  ‎  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHbF9ynGZV0

‎ 

[Smittiox]

pics

[HwitVlf]

x2mdl moves the root of each object in a model to XYZ=0 during the conversion process. That only changes when the first frame of animation moves everything to its proper place. It was mentioned that this bug had been fixed, but I have no idea which version if any of x2mdl actually contain the fix.

x2mdl also has and interpolation path-finding issue that makes moving parts sometimes twitch into a mirror image of what they're supposed to be. I've had some success with fixing those "twitches" by changing the keyframe placement.