Synide p3dm2lxo

[Stavanger]

News + Mirror by Combat-Prison.net

P3dm2lxo v0.2 by Synide

best Regards,
Stavanger

[Mr Burns]

Thx for the tools! Although i will never understand the black magic behind them

Mirror by Armed-Assault.de

[rstratton]

u would be a hero in my book if you were to make plugins to import/export p3d's for 3ds max

[Foxhound]

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[Synide]

u would be a hero in my book if you were to make plugins to import/export p3d's ***for 3ds max

It is entirely within my capability to do that... but the 'work' involved is really more than i want to invest. I've had an initial foray into maxscript only, as at the time i was just investigating whether it would be 'easy' or 'hard'.

the upshot was that i decided that i didn't really want to learn yet another products scripting language and application vagaries. I may change my mind on this at some stage, dunno.

I settled at lwo2 format because...

1. the file format is well documented and open (as opposed to fbx)
2. the file format is capable of supporting discontinuous UV maps.
3. the file format is capable of supporting per vertex weight mapping.
4. the file format is supported by my favourite modelling tool - modo.

Unfortunately modo is not very strong on the animation side atm, and as it's one area i personally want to spend a lot more time in with character modelling i may be forced to go back to looking at getting things working over in Max/Maya.

I'm still investigating ways to go from Modo->Endorphin and Endorphin->Modo and bypass Max/Maya all together.

[blackjack[VS]]

Synide, 1st of all, thanks a lot for the effort you have put on this tool. i had some minutes today to test you tool, with XSI and it works impressively well, with the exception to the uv's. so i hope you can give me a light on the reason why the uv's weren't exported. i'll try to explain everything i did...

1- i opened the standard p3d bis soldier in o2.
2- applyed one rtm animation to him, and saved the new p3d.
3- runned p3dm2lxo and had 2 new files
4- went to xsi and opened the new bis_soldier.lwo
5-still in xsi i opened the mdd file.
6- everything is perfect, and when i play the animation slider, EVERYTHING moves perfect. No idea how hard was for you to do this, but congratulations again for the great job.

Other relevant details...
-The soldier mesh+ proxys were all together in the same mesh...
-there's a weight ?map? attached to the mesh, but couldnt see anything so far of what it was suposed to bring in.
-the uv channel has ALL the uv coordinates of the mesh, in the 0;0 position.
-there's 1 material assigned to the all mesh, without texture path or reference.


Ok now i'm wondering if this is happening with the uv's, because i missed the step you described here:

Quote[/b] ]1. go through each LOD and Ctrl-A, 'merge near 0.001', F5, Ctrl-D them all. (Make a macro to do it...) (Select All, Merge Near, Recalc Normals, Deselect)

I'll post a screenshot/video if you guys want, with the bis soldier animating in xsi. i was really happy with it.

And fyi, softimage has a FREE version of xsi, called xsi mod tool, that opens both lwo and mdd files. This can be significantly important for those searching a good tool for animation/modeling/uv's and texturing. Its free and there's a lot of info in the web about it.

When i get home, i'll repeat the process until i figure i way to see my uv's correct.

Thanks again, and that lwo2p3d will be the cherry in the top of the cake, for most of us!!
Count with me for any help or feedback!

[Synide]

@blackjack[VS]... Gidday, hmmm... learn something new everyday... didn't know there was a 'free' version of XSI... i'll have a squizzy.
Yeah, the lwo file being produced is perhaps not 100% lwo flawless format... i thought i got it into lwo2 (which is the 2.0 extended version) pretty well but obviously not 100%.
It works fine with modo, but as I mentioned I wasn't prepared to go through some rigorous testing regime with all sorts of apps.
Since that XSI version is 'free' I'll have a look. I'd say that the problem you're having with the textures and the uv's are definitely because the file isn't flawless lwo format and XSI is having problems processing it. modo has no problems with it.

As far as the mesh being all one 'object' - this is by design.
I dunno about other products but in modo a polygon can only belong to 1 'part' or 'object' - either no part or a named part.
But, a poly can belong to more than one 'selection'.
In O2 poly's and verts can belong to more than one 'component selection'. If I tried to 'replicate' this senario using 'parts' in modo then I'd end up with multiple duplicate verts and poly's. Instead I have made the entire geometry just one mesh object and 'split up' the faces & verts by selections - this is the way it has to be. The result of doing it this way is that the face/vert count in the O2 model should match the face/vert counts over in modo exactly.

[blackjack[VS]]

You can find Mod tool here.

I've been fighting with this uv's for a while, and i almost did the uv recovery with success.
So since the lwo wasn't passing any uv's information to xsi or even deepexplorer, i've exported from o2 the very same soldier torso (i'm exporting pieces of mesh from shared texture selection) in 3ds format.
This 3ds when imported in xsi is fine relating to the uv's. That seems good news!
My idea was to now copy the uv's from the 3ds imported mesh to the uv's of the lwo mesh.
I've tryed over and over, but it just couldn't past...then i remembered to check the poly count of both meshes and they surprise! they aren't exactly the same(it happened to me before experience at work).
Both meshes have the same number of triangles, but the lwo has 4 less polygons then the 3ds files.
I'll triangulate them both, and see what happens.
Gona retry this later, and report if i have any luck.

[Synide]

ahhh... i see... well it's like this...

there are two types of UV maps in the world

1. ***a plain ordinary UV map
2. a discontinous UV map

Usually one has both a plain UV Map in a model file and it is supplemented by a smaller discontinuous UV Map.

In my efforts to make it easier for myself I am only writing out one UV Map, the discontinuous one... this is fine for Modo, but obviously LW & XSI don't like it.

I think i can fix that...

Also, I've downloaded that XSI Mod Tool... looks interesting... i couldn't really work out how to use it very well... I might have to though 'cause it does have animation tools in it....
I also noticed that the LWO import/export & MDD features are Point Oven... as this lwo file is not being constructed by a Point Oven plugin from within another application I am most probably not formating the lwo file correctly as the LWO PO Import feature in XSI is expecting. And, this is supported by the fact that once i get the lwo open in XSI Mod tool in the Scene Info it's saying it didn't bring in a few hundred poly's 'cause they had more the five (5) verts. Which I know is crap... there are only 3 & 4 vert poly's in these lwo's.

Modo, loads them fine.

I dunno mate... I'll have a think about how much time I want to spend trying to get a flawless import/export working for this XSI Mod Tool - it's just I'm getting to the point where it's yet another application - yet another whole area of quirks & research and tweaking and so, on and so on... application & sensory overload...

edit:

Also...

Quote[/b] ]
4- went to xsi and opened the new bis_soldier.lwo
5-still in xsi i opened the mdd file.
6- everything is perfect, and when i play the animation slider, EVERYTHING moves perfect. No idea how hard was for you to do this, but congratulations again for the great job.

I couldn't work out how you got that to work in the Mod Tool, when i tried it it just deform the mesh horribly...

[DMarkwick]

I'm keeping a very close eye on Modo, to be sure it's eventually going to be among the biggest & best of 3D applications. I like the way it's gradually expanding to encompass more & more 3D disciplines, modeling, texturing, rendering, next up animating.

I suppose that you already know that Modo is made by guys who left the Lightwave studios right? They figured Lightwave wasn't going in the direction they particularly wanted it to so they set up a new studio. Doing well too by the looks of it.

One day Modo will replace my Lightwave install I'm sure, but not just yet I mostly do renderings & animation so LW still does the job for me, and I spent too much on plugins to just throw all that out