Boothand

Some progress: Not finished weighting completely, but getting close. On the other hand, I've already warned the public of my experience with animation, so this is what I with my very limited experience managed to piece together, in the first round of things (some of the body swaying motion disappeared now though, when putting an IK chain there.. for now). @@DT85, @@minilogoguy18, I suspect you guys know more about frames than I do. Would this be enough to make a looping walk cycle (blend the first and last frame of the loop)?

Shader: (Snatched from Forest House) In my test map:

I colorized one of my own textures to what I imagined it could look like, but not sure how you want it to look. It might also be a bit too unclean? Tile preview.

Yeah, definitely added all bones. Okay, one of the most annoying things in the world just happened. It started working for no reason. Really, I'd rather it was still broken I suspect this is something that will haunt me all my life - I get persistent problems until I ask someone for help, then it fixes itself. Seems my Max 2013 can save 2010 compatible files, so if I get stuck again, I'll gratefully throw a 2010 file in your direction ^^ Thanks.

Any chance @@Psyk0Sith knows what could be causing the mirror weight tool to not mirror correctly? The vertices are mirrored perfectly and work that way as well, however are assigned to bones on the side I'm mirroring from instead of the corresponding mirrored bone. Googled it, and have tried the suggestions, such as resetting the Xform. Bones were mirrored by Bone Tools mirroring, and then positioned at the exact negative value of its position. Pivot point of the model is centered. Any possibilities without re-doing the skeleton and starting over? (Max 2013: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58757568/ZOrray3_Rig.max)

Hmm, I think it's a bit scary to try to equalize the game's (already mastered) music to sound better. The quality of the music is one of the things that weren't lessened by the time of the release or the engine, after all. Personally, I wouldn't touch it, or at least not use any plugins (such as normalization). Without the single tracks it's also quite limited what you can change with precision, considering every instrument will be affected equally. If you'd like a more bassy sound, you could try to play around with the equalizer, but I think that's very risky, and making a change there that will be noticed might do more to clutter up the sound image rather than just strengthen the bass or the treble. I seem to remember the in-game music (at its loudest) was quite balanced. It's already as loud as it gets, in my opinion, and you'd risk clipping by pushing it. Making a fuller sound shouldn't involve turning up the volume anyway though, at this point. Anyway, it sounds as if the track you posted went unharmed through the changes, and there's indeed stronger low frequencies which can be nice. Always check every track closely for clipping though.

If you feel like using any of these textures, feel free! No need for them to stay in limbo for years until I can release maps with them myself anyway http://jkhub.org/topic/3429-some-mapping-textures-im-working-on/

Not too happy with this yet. Just wanted to see how it currently looked. So the normal maps don't work on the legs. For no reason (I've triple checked 20 times). When I assign the normal maps, just like the head and torso, they can't be found in the console. Have tried giving them different names and all, copying the exact recipe, only switching out the names, but it was not meant to work this time. JKA wins!

Yeah, I fixed it now by welding manually before mirroring (actually didn't keep the symmetry modifier when weighting, so collapsed it instead. It duplicates vertices in strange places. I didn't understand it. But for now it's okay.) I'm having some other issues though. I'm not sure how to word this correctly, but I'll give it a try: The orray has four legs obviously, and I'm using the "Paste green to blue vertices" weight mirroring method. But this means that when I'm choosing the left leg, and fixing the weights for that leg, and then mirroring it, the mirrored vertices on the other side will also be weighted to the left leg bone, instead of the right bone. All the bones are mirrored (Bone tools) before weighting. This might also just have to do with me not reading enough manuals, so in the meantime, I'll do that

Aaah thanks! Seems like a lot of the progress survived there Now I've just got to deal with a mirror seam that refuses to weld...

Started the rig and weighting, but Max eventually crashed and corrupted my saved file. Will have to start from making the skeleton again.

I'm a huge fan of this: http://jkhub.org/tutorials/article/147-mapping-efficiency-mitre-faces/ It can be applied to a lot. Basically, make sure edges don't overlap each other unnecessarily, or that you aren't using two brushes where you can use one. It's surprising how just dragging edges around can make other brushes excessive.

I did this in JK2 with some camera commands + a slight pk3 modification. I'm sure the same is possible in JKA. In my opinion, a bit easier to follow than true-view.

I've used some tutorials by a guy called Lee Jackson. It's quite beginner friendly, and he's comfortable listening to! Character box modeling: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE62BED1FBBB38395 Character edge loop modeling: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6E939B22849DFAAD Full (well, not quite) character tut: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE4693155A242C51F (video #9 exists, just not in the playlist) Different guy, head modeling tutorial which I like, but requires a bit more effort and experience to follow: Modeling the human head made easy. Link found on @@Psyk0Sith's website - full character and rig: http://www.3dtotal.com/ffa/tutorials/max/joanofarc/joanmenu.asp

All my models end up with the same guilty smile...

If you send yours, or a portion of it, that would be nice!

Maybe the nose could be thinner?

Some progress: https://skfb.ly/AKzU No eyes or teeth yet, and no rig yet. Decided to take it to Zbrush instead of Mudbox and thus re-doing the sculpt. Currently has this diffuse + normal maps. Seams aren't really as messed up as they are in this sketchfab link though.

models/map_objects/beerbottle/beerbottle.md3 The compiler doesn't expect the base/models path, but only starting from models/etc. It would probably be more natural to put the beerbottle model in some folder where you keep all of your custom ones, but that's up to you, if you're happy the way it works now Also, I recommend customizing/re-texturing the bottle logo, and scale it down to 512 x 512 when you're done.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/58757568/beerbottle.MD3 Ok, after testing this myself some more, here are the instructions: Make a caulk brush, and shape it roughly how you want the collision to be. Use a non-solid caulk if you don't want collision at all. Inside this caulk brush, make a small square brush and put system/origin on it. The bottle's pivot point is on the bottom, and the pivot point will be aligned with the origin brush. With both selected, make them into a func_static. Set the value of model2 to the path of the model, but always be sure to use / slashes like you did, instead of \. A little hitch is that once the pivot point is off-cam, the whole model disappears. This might be the behavior of misc_model_static and other models that aren't baked into geometry? @@eezstreet? For bottles it shouldn't be that noticable though. The reason why you didn't see the heater model was probably because it spawned somewhere else, thus the need for an origin brush.

Welcome! Feel free to post some screenshots of maps you've been working on As with most things related to the modding of this game, training in the softwares themselves usually serve as the foundation you need for understanding the steps for rigging models and animations for these games. Then it becomes easier to understand. If you have any specific questions that aren't answered clearly in tutorials, make a thread in the modding assistance forum and you should get some more tips on what to do/where to go.

I'll test if I can get models to move via scripts. But one thing you could try - make a caulk brush func_static and set its model2 value to the path of the model. The description says "md3 model to also draw", so if it doesn't work with the .ase bottle, try a default assets .md3 model to see if that works. In which case, I'll export .md3 of that bottle (and about 10x smaller ) Edit: Can confirm that it works, but only with md3. I'll give you a .md3 beerbottle, but to keep your assets clean, you'd have to tell me which folder path in the models folder you prefer me to export to, as that's the folder path you'll have to place the textures in.

Honestly, I'm not sure what the numbers 56 and 54 etc mean. Maybe @@therfiles has a clue? At least you've done it correct for moving an object to a tag. Use the uppermost "move" for that (<vec>, <vec>, <float>)

Yeah that's correct. The tag holds a vector, so the script refers to that XYZ position.

Very cool. To me, the ear just seems a bit straight/flat. Would be cool with a wireframe/sketchfab on the next update