Some wierd problems in my custom meshes/textures

[crusniknano]

Ok, so I have been trying to add a bunch of items in my own custom mod and am running into quite a few problems. I have been around all the following, bioware social network, damods, dragon age modding wordpress tutorials, the da builder wiki, blender.com, and dragon age nexus searching for answers to these problems on my own for around a solid week now;

(Oh, and my current strategy uses blender Import/Export script from NewByPower to export [ver 0.11.] Then play with the mesh a bit, export using the FBX converter in blender, and finishing it of using tazpn's command line tools.)

 

1st off, there is the fact that custom meshes I made from scratch in blender don't seem to work when exporting using tazpn's tools. This kinda makes sense and isn't a big deal as long as I can get #2 working.

 

2nd, at random intervals tazpwns converter scripts work and at others they don't. I have been trying to narrow it down depending on what settings cause it, but without much luck. I narrowed down a few settings, but still it seems quite random.

 

3rd, Custom textures with GIMP don't seem to work if I change the file name from anything but the original if ripping them from the game using NewByPower's tool. Neither do any custom textures, for that matter. (Using BS/DXT1 compression and creating mipmaps. I get an error about the mipmaps not being the same size so it can't make them.) *I'm pretty sure this one is a simple fix, but I still have no idea.

 

4th, I tried to make a set of custom gloves (used the hm_glv_nud_0.msh file) and got them to export correctly but then the gloves were not following the animation of the hands correctly. I even went as far as to use the original of the file to set the position when exporting out of blender (that resulted in the gloves sitting a few inches on either side of the player without any animation showing.)

 

Tools and OS:

Windows 7 professional

Blender (latest version)

NewByPower I/O script ver. 0.11

Tazpn's Command Line Tools ver. 1.4.3

Build_Helpers 1.1 (for Command Line Tools)

DATool 0.5 (don't really use it, but tried it for a tutorial)

 

Thanks for at least reading this incredibly long post!

[kzelsama]

1&2 : I don't use tazpn's tools to export, they seem to be made for 3dMax's .fbx and don't like Blender's much. NewByPower's scripts allow you to export new models if you do a little editing here and there, here's what I do : http://thenexusforums.com/index.php?showto...0&start=10#

 

3 : First, you don't want to use DXT1 compression unless you don't use the alpha channel. Most of all, do not use it for normal maps as the alpha channel is used for the X information. Prefer DXT3 or DXT5, or uncompressed RGBA4. To create mipmaps, make sure the texture's height and width are in powers of 2 (1024, 2048), not necessarily the same for both. To make the game use your renamed texture you need to edit the texture path in the model's material object (.mao file).

 

4 : all armor models need to be weighted along the proper skeleton, I'm guessing yours is not. The fastest way is to use BoneWeightCopy from another set of gloves.

[crusniknano]

Sweet! This is pretty simple! Thanks!