Mesh swapping

[djlarryt]

I know a couple of you guys have been working on this- taking parts of meshes and swapping/ mashing them onto other meshes (eg Sullivan's head on Chuck's body, Amber swaps, etc)

Has there been any tutorials on how you are managing to swing this?

What I'm trying to accomplish is this (for starters, beginning small and seeing how it works to move up): taking chuck's underwear body and adding a piece of another mesh onto it, eg the arm band from the Blue Oyster uniform or the hunting jacket hazard vest.

Some of the clothing meshes are done in pieces so I know they can be separated by joined sections (eg Mankini has separate top and bottom sections).

I tried breaking apart the Baseball Player uniform but got a model with holes because there was no body mesh under certain parts of the clothing mesh. Then I tried adding the individual pieces of the uniform on top of the model into the .big file and the game crashed (even though I added the texture mapping files in there too).

What I'd like to start with is to take Chuck's underwear body and join the Blue Oyster groin cover to it (it's a separate piece from the chaps).

Can anyone provide any insight?... thanks

[tommah]

you're thinking about this the same way I initially thought about this, taking random mesh and adding them to existing meshes. Although that MAY be possible (no one has successfully done it, yet) there's a different way of going about this.

essentially what you would do is open the .big file of an oufit and remove every "geo_" entry you don't need from the "SceneDescription" and pack it up... now if you want to wear this, you'll have to set it to a piece of clothing you aren't using.

now naked model modding is tough because what you figured out, there's never chuck's body underneath clothing. The way around this is to swap this with a "facewear_" item, I always swap the facewear_Hygiene_Mask because its close in the Royal Flush Plaza. That was you put on your naked outfit, run and put on the hygiene mask but instead of putting the hygiene mask on he'll throw on the groin cover.

hope that helps...

by the way, does chuck have legs underneath the blueoyster pants? or is it empty?

[djlarryt]

Hi Tom,

Yes that does help, thanks! I know there are a few pieces of clothing/facewear I probably won't ever use just because I don't really like them- so sacrificing them for other pieces makes perfect sense.

So basically I just pack up the pieces I DO want to use and rename them to the filename of the clothing item I'm replacing, correct?

Eg in your example rename the modified Blue_Oyster_bottoms.big to facewear_Hygiene_Mask.big (same with Blue_Oyster_bottoms.tex) and replace facewear_Hygiene_Mask?

I'll give this a try tonight when I get home.

Also, Chuck has no legs under the Blue Oyster pants. But the groin cover and the piece that hides his butt are one section.

[tommah]

yep, that's right... set the blue oyster legs to the facewear and they'll still show up where they were meant to. Good Luck!

[anno1404]

Can someone make a video of this process for the rest of us, so you can get more help in Mesh swapping? This sounds rather complex.

[djlarryt]

OK making progress. Tom's method worked, so I'm moving ahead...

Anyone have any experience with alpha channel textures in DR2 yet? Or, do you know of a texture map that has one? Tomorrow I'm going to try hiding part of a mesh by adding an alpha channel to the .dds map.... and see if that works....

I thought the fishnet shirt would be alpha mapped to show the chest through the mesh but it isn't

[tommah]

sorry, not that I know of... All my models were made by the process I just mentioned, only many more steps to get every piece.

[djlarryt]

I know there are a few textures with alpha channels mapped. When I was messing around with simple skin mods I did a few .dds saves and saw a message popup stating "Warning: alpha information will be lost." Unfortunately I don't remember which maps did that, so I can't go to them and open them to see how the alpha was handled. I guess I'll just have to open/close a few I remember doing and see if I can find one at random.

I tried a quick alpha channel using traditional black & white stencil but it didn't work, so I'm thinking that DR2 may use another two colors.

Maps with the suffix "_cm" are color maps. Alpha channels will be in these.
Maps with the suffix "_nm" are luminance maps (? I'm not in front of my game right now so I can't remember exactly how they're suffixed). These outline how shiny a texture should be (metals, leathers, etc)
The other maps are "bump" maps, which give the effect of raised and lowered areas without actually modifying the geometry (used in textures for grainy effect, scales, blemishes, hair, etc on models)

[tommah]

the third bump map is "_map"

[anno1404]

how do you convert cm files?

I use quickbms.exe to open and convert all characters and items, but am unable to convert the data/model/environment cm files. Suggestions please?

[tommah]

you use quickbms.exe to extract the .tex file... when extracted, it is converted to a .dds file.

the files in an unpacked .tex file (using gibbed.tools) aren't .dds files and can't be edited

[anno1404]

Apr 20, 2011 11:49:29 GMT -5 tommah said:

you use quickbms.exe to extract the .tex file... when extracted, it is converted to a .dds file.

the files in an unpacked .tex file (using gibbed.tools) aren't .dds files and can't be edited

Alas, if it were really that easy.

Quickbms.exe will NOT work for model/environment packed .tex files.

I noticed the Bigfile.xml coding in these environment files is slightly different, with an extra couple of words for each item that is being packed. (quickbms.exe and gibbed's use this file as a kind of road map on what to pack and what to not pack)

example of a environment bigfile.xml file

Failed tries:

1. changing the Bigfile.xml coding makes no difference, they are still not converted with Qucikbms.

2. Adding these files into another file, adding that name to the Bigfile.xml, then packing that file and running quickbms still does not work.

My guess is that these environment texture files are somehow different. the person who made the script to open dead rising 2 files only made the script for npsc.big, cinematic, and steamassets, but never bothered to make it compatible with the environment files.

The only solution I can think of is I would have to make a new quickbms script for the environment files, which is extremely difficult to do. I tried to read the instructions, and I would have to dedicate hours to understand them.

I can view the environment files in texmod, but texmod is limited, tedious and I can't match the name of the texture produced with texmod with the actual texture name in the environment files.