Trying to add player model to Nexuiz. Also, hi!

[-styx-]

Hi, I'm Styx.

I've been playing Nexuiz for about a week and really enjoying it, I found it fun and well put together. I noticed it needs a bit of a face lift in the art department and I'd be happy to help out as a developer when I have free time.

I'm a freelance artist and modeler by trade, but in the past I've worked on various games including Spyro and Hellboy. I can concept, model, texture, rig and animate. I can also do sprites and particles. (My online portfolio.)

I had a free weekend and put together some ideas, including this generic marine type player model-



(I tag all my pictures lately... who knows where these things end up....)



He is using a 512 texture and is sitting on under 2500 polys. I could probably knock some more out if necessary.

I've been trying to get him in-game for a while but I'm not having much luck. I'm getting my information from here and here, it could be an incomplete method for all I know... Maybe someone can help me out, here's what I've done so far-

I'm using the half-life 2 sdk to export the smds. I've exported the model an animations as smds, making sure mesh.smd has mesh and skeletal information and the other files have only the skeletal animations. I made sure the smd animations in the folder have the same names as all the other models. When I export the smds and make a config-zym.txt and run compile-zym.bat it builds successfully and I get a zym file that is about 1.4mb (so the size seems right, judging by the other models). I put the model in data/models/player/modelname.zym and the texture with it. When I run the game and type playermodel data/models/player/modelname.zym, the player model switches to the default marine and it gives me no error message as to why it didn't work. Is there a way that I can enable debug or developer messages in the console, so I can see what is failing when I try to load the model?

Once I have a player model working, I'm intending to do some custom animations and then maybe do a few more models, such as these-





I'm also happy to help with art on the To Do list, but I read several times that it's not current. What's the situation with the ammo boxes?

[morfar]

Wow. Those concepts looks awesome. And the finished models can be included into Nexuiz for sure. They must have GPL v2 license to be included.
What Nexuiz has always needed is new modern looking player models and these looks very nice. The monster-bunny might be too weird but dunno

I can't help with getting them into the game. I know ai is currently getting a model into the game. And he uses Maya also.

So don't go anywhere

What's the situation with the ammo boxes?

Most ammo boxes are new in 2.5. Only the Cell ammo is unchanged, I'm sure it can be improved somehow, it's an energy/plasma based ammo.

[ai]

First of, yeah, really amazing concepts I'm so jealous of your talent. >.<
Secondly, you said Half-Life 2 sdk, is it the same as source sdk? Cause source sdk exports the smd's with incorrect information.
Basically, this is how you should do it. Nexuiz apparently uses rigid bind style type. But you can use smooth bind if you set Max Influences to 1, no shared vertex information must exist, at least, that's what we have been told.
So, when exporting the smd (with sourcesdk) it looks something like this:

Code: Select all

textures/players/torso
40   17.102034   -2.793205   51.80814     0.865048    0.032616   -0.500628    0.029942    0.223095    1  22    1       
40   14.908265   -2.332115   52.000145    0.320904   -0.7225     -0.612384    0.109069    0.156303    1  21    1       
40   16.32485    -2.254179   50.793995    0.228077   -0.599514   -0.767179    0.014559    0.157157    1  22    1       
textures/players/torso
40    4.018598   -1.318007   42.335651    0.951136   -0.306944   -0.033558    0.306625    0.313961    1   1    1       
40    3.404923    1.091715   42.899494    0.602112    0.782074   -0.16069     0.259275    0.315173    1   1    1       
40    4.198301   -1.258705   45.901512    0.95106    -0.301144   -0.069267    0.304798    0.268313    1   2    1       
textures/players/torso
40    4.198301   -1.258705   45.901512    0.95106    -0.301144   -0.069267    0.304798    0.268313    1   2    1       
40    3.404923    1.091715   42.899494    0.602112    0.782074   -0.16069     0.259275    0.315173    1   1    1       
40    3.55256     1.645535   46.170151    0.60231     0.795356   -0.068061    0.259912    0.271753    1   2    1   

As you can see, the last 3 things you see is something like this '1 22 1'. The middle part is the bone number, this has to be the first number to the left of the file (instead of 40 in this case).
So you'd have to manually (of scary thing) to change this and delete those two other '1's at the end. But!
Then, luck came to us and a dude named Joshua popped up in the forums looking to create player models as well. He noticed that this smd information was wrong if you want to use it for Nexuiz.
He created a perl script that fixed this problem. You had your exported mesh.smd and a .pl file. Then you typed this in the command prompt: perl parsh_mesh.pl mesh.smd (if you had everything directly under C:\). This would create a new file with the correct bone information.
Then just taking this mesh.smd file and compile it with zym together with the animations and it worked super.

Now, it this the same problem you have or you maybe using smooth bind with shared vertex information? If you do have the same problem with the incorrect smd bone information (the '1 22 1' in the end) you could try to get a hold of him, sending him a PM here on the forums could work. As he's the one who created this script and gave me a copy I am careful of just posting it up or giving it away. Better talk to him. But he's a nice guy, if you ask him he might give it to you.
His forum name is 'glennxserge'.

PS. This is how the smd should look like when it's correct:

Code: Select all

textures/players/torso
22   17.102034   -2.793205   51.80814     0.865048    0.032616   -0.500628    0.029942    0.223095   
21   14.908265   -2.332115   52.000145    0.320904   -0.7225     -0.612384    0.109069    0.156303   
22   16.32485    -2.254179   50.793995    0.228077   -0.599514   -0.767179    0.014559    0.157157   
textures/players/torso
1    4.018598   -1.318007   42.335651    0.951136   -0.306944   -0.033558    0.306625    0.313961   
1    3.404923    1.091715   42.899494    0.602112    0.782074   -0.16069     0.259275    0.315173   
2    4.198301   -1.258705   45.901512    0.95106    -0.301144   -0.069267    0.304798    0.268313   
textures/players/torso
2    4.198301   -1.258705   45.901512    0.95106    -0.301144   -0.069267    0.304798    0.268313   
1    3.404923    1.091715   42.899494    0.602112    0.782074   -0.16069     0.259275    0.315173   
2    3.55256     1.645535   46.170151    0.60231     0.795356   -0.068061    0.259912    0.271753

Oh, one last thing, if you change the names of the triangles in the smd to a path like in above examples, that's where it will look for the texture. Could you please try to use the same path as me? I want to have a common place for all the player model textures in one place, and actually _inside_ the /textures folder
A quick 'Search and Replace' should do the trick.

[C.Brutail]

Hi and welcome to the forums! I cannot help you, but those ocncepts look real great!
Keep up the good work!

[[-z-]]

Wow, very impressive.

[ai]

Oh btw. I'm usually documenting my progress and telling what I am doing in my project thread. I recently did start on the models and I have explained some steps and so fourth. If you take a read there it might give you some tips and such.

Link: http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.ph ... &start=270

[FruitieX]

Oh my, that is simply amazing! We should delete all the old models (except the new marine ) and replace them with these, because the playermodels are currently the only ugly thing in the game (IMO)!

[Dokujisan]

This is awesome.

Very very impressive. I hope you stick around and contribute more to Nexuiz.
You could help take it to another level of quality.

[tChr]

Excellent..

One of N's boggest priblems are the models thats been with us forever, they are somewhat ok, but they have always been a source of great frustration because of the high polycount and following recource hogging.

If you read back in the forums, you will find that there has been use for new models since.. forever (i should know), so that such an extremely talented, and technically skilled developer is willing to put in some effort is just awesome!



Ps.
I'm alive

[FruitieX]

One of N's boggest priblems ...

they have always been a source of great frustration because of the high polycount and following recource hogging.

Yes, they are very high-poly compared to what they look like in the end.