[MOD] Yisha's Alternative Body + (a small face texture overwork mod)

[TargetLost]

We urgend need to create an own thread for the XAC DAE converter project.

I still try to wrap my mind around how you were ever able to extract specs of unknown files. Looks quite impossible to me..but of course this is awesome for us.

Thank's for the bone influence explanation. That's a bit how i thought it works withought really knowing it.
However I still miss an element here.

If I don't err a bone has anchor, a position a length and an orientation.
So if we move a bone we move it's postion and orientationa nd any bone connected to it...we move the skeleton.

Where the influences are just wightings of the bone positions and orinetations the game nevertheless still needs the bone to calculate the new vertices position or am i wrong in this?

Or is it the way that the animation frame contains the already calculated vertices positions only and the game doesnt calulate it anymore..so kind of a recorded unalterable movie frame than?

In that case I guess we have to extract/create an approximation ridge because I don't know how you can create an NPC mesh when you cant map it correctly to the existing hidden bones in the animations. ..and a static NPC isn't funny.


You seem to have a lot knowledge in this much more than I have.
Maybe we scould make a shared/cowork project out of this somehow.

p.s. Thanks pax for your input. I guess yes that fiel might be helpfull in this case.

[arc_]

Animation files only contain bone transformations (movement/rotation/scaling); the vertex positions are calculated at runtime. However, the game does not need the original bone positions and weights for calculating the new vertex positions.

In a traditional modeling program, you indeed define a bone as a start + end point and a "pull strength" (weight). When you move a bone, the program finds out which vertices are in the bone's "sphere of influence" and moves those along with the bone, over the same distance and in the same direction. If you rotate the bone, again the vertices around it rotate the same amount over the same axis.

What the XAC format does is precalculate the vertices that are in each bone's "sphere of influence". Thus, while an animation is playing and a bone is moved, you no longer need the bone itself: you *already have* the list of vertices that you need to move. In short, you're skipping a step compared to the modeling program. The animation file tells you that bone 3 moved a certain amount, and you can immediately move that bone's vertices the same amount.

So yes, as said, in order to create new NPC meshes you'll have to rebuild a new skeleton as an approximation of the vanilla one, with the correct bone ID's assigned.

I'll leave the creation of tools to you for now while I read into the remaining file formats.

[Scrappy Coco]

ey Guys,

@arc_ : awesome txt files it should be possible to make a maxscript for export.

@targetlost: I am now getting into maxScript exporters, on my search throu the internets I found an other maxScript to import xac directly to 3ds max, last night I was able to Import every xac file. And I think I saw Bones and/or id´s like the eyes, there was a handle for the eyes called eyes_look_at. It was pretty late last night, but I had a idea, I will try tonight, the idea is: looking through hex at a saved 3d-file in comparement to a xac file, one must be able to even change some vertices, save and cut out the changed part, and put it in hex inside the original xac. I hope somebody understands what I mean. I think t will not be possible to add vertices , but to change the ones that are there. I now found a way to mod all the dds file, which I used to change in photoshop (I made my own grannys to look like melissa kurland ), now I use it on the 3D model, this is quite a step forward for me, because I now can make real good textures, and don´t need the game to look at it - btw did you know that you can change the dds files on the fly, while game is running , it was pretty nice to do it that way

Cheers Scrappy Coco

[HotIce]

Nice mod - thanks. The old model was starting to grate on me..

[arc_]

Adding .xsm (bone-based animation): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/60681258/xsm.txt

Not quite sure yet what the "pose" and "bind pose" transformations refer to, but it's clear that every SkeletalSubMotion defines a number of position/rotation/scaling keyframes for a certain bone. The names of the SkeletalSubMotions match the node names in the .xac... So maybe nodes = bones and InfluenceData.boneId = nodeId? Will continue to investigate, but it seems that way.

[TargetLost]

finally created the Thread:

[Research/Tool] The .XAC to .DAE Converter Project
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=358573

@mods: feel free to move the related posts in this thread to that new thread.

[TargetLost]

If you have installed YishaFace I recomment you to install the new version:

[MOD] YishaFaceV1_2.zip
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ecblwt3rla5oydu/ecIhOZM_gY

The Reason: I did not include the small Textures in the previous version and that causes that you see teeth and eyes only and no face for a short time till the game loads the real textures. (quite shocking)

Obviously the game needs the small textures and renders the face first with them till it loads the real ones and it also seems that it wants to have them at the same place like the new linked textures.

Today I also checked for the Eyes. But I can play around with the shader values as much as I like it never erases the eye overblending environement effect.

You know this white zombie eyes... Whatever ES did here.. I really would like to get right of that uglyness. White Zombie eyes kills everything.