Post by redmanpro on Feb 24, 2020 14:31:34 GMT 10
Hello there! Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere but I've researched extensively in this forum and I can't seem to find anyone talking about this. All the tutorial videos seem to have been deleted long ago as well so I've been having to piece together how things work. (I've found a RE5 modding tutorial video for download but it had confusing info and ultimately it didn't help)
I want to edit Jill's RE3 costume but before I get into editing the mesh, I've been trying to make sure the whole process of importing and exporting works. For this test, I've extracted the original pl0b.arc file and imported pl0b.mod into 3DS Max 2012 64bits by using codeman's script. All looks good.
Then I immediately select all 150 meshes and hit "export to mod", choosing the original pl0b.mod in the following window. I rename the created .newmod to test.mod and import it into 3DS Max with the script once again, to see if everything exported fine. This is where I hit a brickwall; a few meshes, 16, 17, 18, 28, 32 are now completely invisible even in wireframe mode, and mesh 36 is horrifyingly distorted. I've read in the forum those are "degenerated" meshes and are useless, but they are present in every other Jill RE3 mod I've tested so far. I've tried not selecting them when exporting the model, but that causes a script vertex error when importing the model back, so clearly they need to be included when exporting.
Additionally, if I repack this model with the weird degenerated meshes and place the .arc into the game's folder, the model is then invisible in-game. Nothing shows except for the weapons.
I've tried scripts 1.3.1, 1.2.4 and 1.2.0, all of them giving the exact same problem when exporting. The only difference I can see from each is that 1.2.0 and 1.2.4 import 9 lod groups and 1.3.1 imports 10. No idea if this impacts anything.
I've also made sure ARCtool is working fine by extracting and repacking the original pl0b.arc with no modifications, which worked perfectly in-game.
Am I doing something wrong here? I'd really appreciate it if someone could lend me a hand.
Thanks in advance!
Edit: I've just found out older script versions create more of those "degenerated" meshes. 1.3.1 is the version with the lowest amount of those. I have no idea how to deal with them.
Edit 2: After some more testing I found out that by using 1.2.4 I am able to export only the meshes I want instead of all of them, not to mention it imports all the bones correctly, something the older versions fail at. I now understand that in order to change a model you're supposed to edit one or more meshes, and select only those when exporting. I don't know why 1.3.1 has that vertex error behavior and at this point I can only assume it's meant to be used for another game of the franchise, with a different model.
I'll leave this thread here seeing as all the basic tutorials are pretty much dead. Maybe it will be useful info to a newcomer.