Please support Wes_h's request for the Milkshape SDK!
kathy:
Oh that is wonderful news!! I may be inspired to start meshing again.
jase439:
If he gets that bone-weighting problem sorted out, that would be the bomb.
wes_h:
As many of you may know, during the warmer times of the year I spend enough of my time (and energy) working at my other love, my Cattle.
During the colder months, I have free time & ambition to build other things.
I very recently joined this board, and am pleased that some people have taken the time to help my efforts.
Here is the official status of my efforts:
I am communicating directly with Mete Ciragan (Mr. MilkShape himself). He has made changes and provided me an alpha/beta type copy of his upcoming V1.7.7 release that has some extra data space that allows extra bones and skin weights to be stored.
I have totally rewritten the plugins in a fashion that takes advantage of that capability, and it works. Shoulders and elbows look just like in the game. There will no longer be different sets of plugins for objects and body meshes... the plugins use the comment fields to set keywords that allow the many variations of GMDCs to be dealt with.
There are still remaining issues before this is finished, and of course, I can't release the plugins until MilkShape 1.7.7 is available, because they cannot run on older versions than that.
There is still a "shadowing" problem remaining on clothing items that have folds in them. An example is the men's T-shirt and boxer shorts, at the waistband and where the pants legs join to the legs. This is caused by the current export interface removing duplicated vertices, which makes the "folded under" parts of the mesh contiguous with the outer faces, which then changes the normals, making them point midway between (which is now downward, rather than straight out), which changes the way the clothes are rendered. The issue, for Mete, is providing a way to avoid doing this without breaking other plugins for other games (some of which cannot accept the duplicated vertices). He has promised me not to release 1.7.7 until we find a solution, which is under way.
Creating "morphs" will require seperate models and special model naming rules. You will no longer be able to use the tilde '~' character as the first character of your model names. So a model named "~body" will either shut down with an error message or simply be left out of the export completely. I know this will inconvenience someone, somewhere, someday, but something has to be special.
The last remaining problem I am having is making the "tangent normals", which are used for bumpmapping, work. I have not yet hit on the proper combination to satisfy BodyShop to allow Semloh's Bump Map Tester to display the bumpmaps, even though I feel I now have made the correct section in the output model. So I am hunting for logs and other diagnostics that may give me a hint over why BodyShop doesn't like them.
I have no release date available, but I hope to post (over at mts2) very soon after, or simultaneously with, the release of MilkShape 1.7.7. This could be days, or still weeks away.
I appreciate all the support,
(my 1st post here!)
kathy:
This is wonderful Wes!! I am keeping an eye on your thread on MTS2 so when it's ready for testing I have a few ideas that I wanted to try. Thankyou once again for your dedication!!
marvine:
Thank you Wes for posting here about your progress; I hope that your efforts will be rewarded soon so that you can get some rest, and that you and Mete find solutions for the remaining issues.
Like Kathy I have some ideas that I can't wait to try, and my current projects would be so much easier to complete with these new plugins - you'll get an idea if I tell you that I have to make child and teen merfolk, meaning having to create the missing bodymod groups, figuring out the right bone assignments and then editing the weightings in SimPE to smoothen the animations and fix the shoulders and elbows blockiness... The perspective of this new tool is just dizzying! :)
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