[Modelling Help] Radium Rifle Restoration to VSG

[KrazyGentleman]

Hello,

 

I have been working on restoring the radium rifle that was released within Far Harbor, to the Volkssturmgewehr it is based on, and essentialy is. However, I have seem to get to the problem where I can fully remove the bolt(or whatever you wanna call them) on the receiver without getting holes in them, and having certain faces not being even. This problem is beyond my capabilities, and I've tried for 4-5 hours now, and I wonder if somebody within the community is able to help me out here.

 

This is the part I'm talking about(marked with red):

http://i.imgur.com/jxZRitE.png

 

Kind regards and thanks in advance,

 

KrazyGentleman

Edited May 19, 2016 by KrazyGentleman

[TrickyVein]

Instead of straight-up removing faces, which creates gaps, remove edges which define the quads belonging to the offending areas along one direction (e.g., oriented →) and then remove the vertices which remain on the edges which are perpendicular (e.g. ↑ ) to the edges just removed.

 

Note that you will probably have to weld vertices first before removing edges.

 

This should preserve UV space as long as the edges which define UV seems are left intact. It looks like that UV seams are highlighted in blue in the pic you shared, so this should work assuming that the knobby bits don't have extra UV projections.

 

Another option is, again, which may require vertices to be welded first, to delete the faces of the knobby things down to the level where you want a smoothed over surface of the mesh and then select the open edges by making a border selection. Then, you can either use the cap tool to close the gaps or go the safer route and create a new shape with those edges selected; next, work on the new shape, creating faces as needed and attach its geometry to the original mesh.

 

This is all of course only possible through working on an Editable Poly or through using an Edit Poly modifier.

[KrazyGentleman]

Sorry for the late response, but thanks for the reply.

 

I think I managed to get it pretty good thanks to your help, but I have no idea what further steps to take. Also, the faces I have added don't seem as smooth as the ones that are already on the mesh. I'm really an beginner modeler, so I wouldn't know.

 

Here's a picture of the progress:

 

http://i.imgur.com/7GgHaS2.png

 

Again, thanks for the help and have a nice weekend,

 

KrazyGentleman

[TrickyVein]

Right, faces all can be assigned distinct smoothing groups which are visible when you select a face and open the 'Smoothing Groups' tab in either editable mesh or editable poly. In fact, you already have this tab open in the screenshot which you just provided.

 

Select an adjacent face which belongs to the group which appears smooth to display which group it belongs to, then select the faces which aren't smoothed and assign them to the same smoothing group.

 

From the screenshot, it looks suspiciously like completely new geometry was made to replace the part of the mesh which had the offending protruding bits. If this is the case, then you'll have to apply an Unwrap UVW modifier to project the new faces.

 

Matching UVs to the weapon's original texture would be the recommended thing to do. If you don't know which texture, use NifSkope to open up the weapon .nif and view which material the part of the gun uses. Track down the diffuse map from in the material for importing it into max to use as a material and background for the UVW editor window. Chances are that filepaths to textures are also redundantly located in a BSShaderTextureSet as part of the BSShaderLightingProperty for the mesh.

 

I haven't used Max 2016, but also note that the program may not be able to display .dds textures with bc7 or similar dx11-compatible compression settings. It's possible to work around this of course by opening the texture in a program which can and saving the texture into a format compatible with 3ds Max, which is basically anything else.

[KrazyGentleman]

Thanks again, your help is greatly appreciated.

 

I've smoothed the parts and the UV work is almost done, but there are exactly 3 faces which look akwardly stretched even though they have the same space as all the other faces on the UV map.

 

Here's an example(apologies for my MSPaint skills):

 

http://i.imgur.com/eVlsmzW.png

 

Thanks in advance,

 

KrazyGentleman

Edited May 21, 2016 by KrazyGentleman

[TrickyVein]

Just curious: why so many Edit Poly and Unwrap UVW modifiers in the stack list?

 

What does it look like when you collapse some of them? I ask because Unwrap UVW is only applied to the face selection in the previous modifier, not across the entire mesh, and that many potential selections could be confusing.

 

There is a bug, or something like it which I've encountered in Max where faces can appear to be distorted in the render view despite good UVs until the object is truncated down into an Editable Mesh.

[KrazyGentleman]

Hi there. Well that's simply because I only got like one face selection when unwrapping a UV because I thought it was necessary to have the whole mesh unwrap, but that could be just me. So basically nothing happens when you collapse them, it's just me being stupid. I'll take a look if can work around that bug then.

[KrazyGentleman]

As a side note though, what compression should I use for .dds textures? I seem to have gotten purple textures in-game for the part where I edited the texture, and the material is set up properly.

[TrickyVein]

The game can read older .dds compression types but Bethesda has recommended using newer dx11 type compression for textures, bc7 for diffuse and bc5 for normal and specular channels. You can use intel's tools for photoshop or a program called texconv, here.

[KrazyGentleman]

Ah, okay thanks. I can't say how I appreciate your help. However, I unfortunately have a different problem; I have 2 magazines which float in the stock when equipped via the workbench, although they use exactly the same model as the other 2 magazines which work fine. I will provide a picture of the issue later today.