BlackThief

well actually I don't care much about that since an inch is a pretty abstract unit for me anyway. (1 Inch = 2.54 cm) it's imho a pretty stupid kind of system of units you guys use in britain and america - why can't you use centimeters, meters, km etc as the rest of the world?

I'll put this onto my list for this weekend. It shouldn't take too long to import the models and resize them in maya and then I can simply test them in the md5 viewer. @ dram yes if you don't want to screw up the deformation you have to merge each edge together by hand, though this will probably end up with texture stretching as well. it'd probably not that bad, since you'll only merge edges that are close together anyway, but it may cause some additonal uv-map tweaking. that's basically the reason I haven't uv-mapped my character yet - I want to rig him frist and test how the deformation works, then I can optimize the mesh and at last uv-map everything. Another thing we have to consider now is animating the faces - even if we just want to have some very basic facial animations, like a talk animation, shout animation, expression of fear or whatever - we'll have to setup the heads properly! in the worst case this will mean I have to remodel every head of oddity's model, since they all have a totally different topology and sometimes quite bad edge loops for animation, which mean that we wouldn't be able to share face animations at all. I think I have to check out id's head models, I believe they all share their face animations and we can probably use these animations if we're going to rig our heads with exactly the same bone structure. a lot of work ahead....

model's looking good, but the texture could use some work. I'll see if I find some time on the weekend. maybe I can help you with that. btw I've seen your posts over at d3world in the maya forum. do you have any experience in painting weightmaps? I'm a total maya noob and I'm having some difficulties with smooth bind.

since I made a major step forward towards importing animated models into d3 today I hope I'll be able to finally rig my character this weekend. Then if everything works fine I can test how the deformations of my lowpoly hand look ingame and then decide which hand model we'll go for. regarding resizing the models I'm not 100% sure how animation files work. I guess the animations will probably look extremly exaggerated, when the animation simply defines that joint x is moved by vector a->, because the vector would still be the same, but the model smaller. what I mean is that the joint of the foot is for example still moved 5 units on the z-axis eventhough the model is now only 10 units tall, which would mean that the foot is raised up to the hip. while the original model was 20units tall and thus the animation looked ok on this one. hope that makes any sense...

woot! finally a small success - first time I got the tavern sign into md5 format! I don't know why, but some of the original defs from id point to maya binary (including the tutorial I was using) and some point to maya ascii files. Now I simply saved the scene as maya ascii and it works However I still have to work on the rig, since the default smooth bind may work for organic models, but not for a sign hanging on a chain... here's a screen from the md5 viewer - woot!!!

ehm, you say you reduce polys automatically with a tool?? please don't do that! these tools really mess up the topology of the mesh, since they work with simple algorithms and don't consider things like proper shading and deformations. and btw I think the uv-maps will be messed up as well, so we'd have to uvmap the whole shit again, too!

about reducing polycount - this will most likely break the model. so we'd have to rig it again and you mustn't forget that these are animated objects, so they may have edges loops that don't add to the shape, but are needed for proper deformation.

I just found that thread about the lightwave to md5 converter. hope that this one works...

I really start to hate maya and all this export to md5 shit. I don't get any export errors in the console anymore, but it's still not working at all. All I get is a 1kb md5mesh and a 6kb md5anim file which doesn't seem to contain anything at all. I'm not sure what's the problem again, since it doesn't even work with the original models from id. I imported the round_swinging_light into maya and tried to export it and I get exactly the same result as with my own models. oh and btw I really can't understand why maya is such a popular and expensive programm. imho the whole interface is absolute bullshit, if it'd be possible I'd rather user lightwave to export our models, eventhough the rigging tools are the worst parts of lightwave.

yes I did a comparison yesterday. As Dram said oddity's hand were really detailed, they're a little more than 500 triangles each. My unoptimized hands are around 370 tris, but they have some edge loops, that are probably not necessary - so I reduced them to 300 tris. I'm not 100% sure anymore, but as far as I remember oddity's mitten hands had around 170 tris, so the difference is not THAT big imho.

at least the dll seems to work now, though I still get an error: "'D:\Games\Doom3\DarkMod\models\maya\tavern_sign.mb' : CreateMesh: No skinClusters found in this scene." but that's probably because of my maya-noobness. something seems to be wrong with the skin, but I guess at least the dll works now.

yes - edit: no, didn't see the last post from today! I'll test the new one.... as I read through it again, I noticed that post from squill: I'll pm squill and ask him to upload maya5.

Id released a dll for several maya version (including 4.5, 5 and 6) with the SDK - you need to put this dll into your d3 directory. Then you have to write a .def for your model, that looks like this: export fred { mesh models/maya/tavern_sign.mb -dest models/md5/environments/tavern_sign anim models/maya/tavern_sign.mb -dest models/md5/environments/tavern_sign } model env_tavern_sign { mesh models/md5/environments/tavern_sign.md5mesh anim af_pose models/md5/environments/tavern_sign.md5anim } when everything runs fine and d3 was able to "connect" to your maya installation and when the dll fits it should convert the maya binary into the md5 files. when I'm trying to do this I get an error in the console Kfailure blablabla - everyone on d3world, who uses maya7 seems to get the same error, so I guess it's because the version here's a link to one of the threads: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic...hlight=kfailure

the conversion from mb to md5 doesn't work with maya 7. it's probably because of the dll, probably because of other reasons. there are several threads on d3world.org where quite a lot made the same experience, but when they tried it with maya 4.5, 5 or 6 it worked...

fingernail is right - it may look almost the same from far a away and with perfect lighting conditions, but it does look odd quite often. Don't forget they used mitten hands for doom3 in 2004 - when will the first beta of TDM be released? end of 2007? We don't have to keep the polycount THAT low - and it has actually not such a big impact on the polycount, as my legionary would still have almost 500 polys less than oddity's guard model with mitten hands

however I can already hear the T3 fanboys whining - T3 had full modelled hands, teh darkmod sucks

it *could* work, once I've got a maya version that is compatible. I'd have to import the md5 and shrink the model and the bones, not sure if this will work though. spar have you checked out if you have 4.5?

it's definitely not very hard to model the mitten hands, but of course you won't be able to use the same texture. Question is if we really want mitten hands on every character - I created full modelled hands for my legionary character with a lot less polygons oddity used. As far as I can tell oddity was quite lazy - he simply took the handmodel of the firstperson view and its texture and thus it was really detailed and highpoly...

I doubt that most of the textures will be so usefull in d3. these are all beauty renders created with extensive use of shaders.

coin purse looks good, but the tiara definitely needs a better texture and probably also a new model with a proper normalmap.

@ spar the oldest dll on iddev.net ist for maya 4.5 - not sure if it's possible to patch the 4.0 version. I'll see if I can find any info about that. edit: negative - looks like maya 4.5 is NOT a patched version of 4.0

@ dom are the normalmaps included? otherwise it won't help much, since it'd be almost impossible to recreate the normalmaps without the highres model. I just learned the very basics of rigging last night, so yes I hope I'll be able rig characters and get them ingame soon...I just need an older version of maya @ spar don't really get what you mean? do you already have maya 5 on a disc or what?

spar don't want to bug you again, but while you're at it. maya 5 would be nice, since it seems to work best with d3. I gave it up with 7, since I spent now almost 5 hours trying to get the shit into d3....

xray: at the top left of your perspective window: shading/x-ray if there are no "joint" boxes in the hypergraph then there're no bones I guess... regarding the textures: you have to enable hardware texturing in the shading menu and to change the path to your texture image just open the hypershade window (window/rendering editors/hypershade). there all materials are listed - select one and a menu on the right should open, there you can change the path to the texture file.

@dom change the view to x-ray and you should be able to see the bones. Then you can select them and try to rotate them. you can also check the hierarchy in the hypergraph window - press space and select window/hypergraph...