3D Studio Max Answers Thread - Forums powered by UBBThreads™

Ok-Well, I decided that there are far too many simple questions about Max that go unanswered. So I am starting this answers thread. Hopefully you will be able to find the answer to your query here, and maybe it would even become a sticky. This will be an ever growing thread, I'll try to cover issues as I come to them.

-----TEXTURING------

First thing you need to do is go to the downloads section on the main page. http://elderscrolls.com and download the nif exporter for morrowind. This will give you the nif exporter and the tes shader. Install those according to the readme file.

You'll also need a plugin called texporter. it can be found here : http://www.cuneytozdas.com/software/

Ok. Open your file in max. You have your object. You need to basically unwrap the faces of the object so that you can lay a texture across it. Because textures are flat, and meshes aren't. So you basically have to flatten out the mesh so you can put a texture on it.

You will unwrap your mesh using a modifier called unwrap uvw. Add that modifier to your mesh. In the modifier menu, under the Parameters roll out, you will see 4 buttons. Edit, Reset UVW's, Save, and Load. Edit will be the one we are primarily working with. I also sometimes find myself using reset.

Click the edit button. You will most likely see a bunch of lines that vaguely represent your mesh. You can close that now, that was just for viewing what it did.

If your mesh isnt an editable poly or editable mesh, convert it to one.

Using the select face function of the Unwrap UVW modifier. (click the plus sign on Unwrap UVW in the modifier stack, then click on Select Face) select faces that will go together other texture. Once you have them selected, you can click that Edit button again, now you should see a flat representation of those faces you selected. You can scale them and place them in their own little section in that blue square.

Ok, now do it again with another set of faces, stuff like legs, and arms. Legs can usually use the same texture for both, so the faces can be put on top of each other in the uvw. Same with arms. Anything that will have the same texture can be placed on top of each other in the uvw.

Continue selecting faces and unwrapping until you're all finished. This is where texporter comes in. Open up texporter in your utilities menu (the hammer) and set the output size to something square like 512x512 or 256x256. Then click pick object and pick your object. This will create a colorful representation of your unwrapped uvw. Now you can save this file.

Take this file into your favorite image editing program, I prefer photoshop. And make your texture. Paint the faces for the face like a face, paint the faces for the arm like an arm. Etc.

Then save this file as a targa...(or dds if you have the plugin which can be found at elderscrolls.com) into your textures folder.

Open Max again. Press M, this brings up your material editor. An essential tool to max.

Under the shader basic parameters rollout. You'll see a pulldown menu that says blinn. Pull it down and select the TES Shader.

Now under the TES shader rollout, look for diffuse, which has a little gray box next to it and a small square button. Press the button. This brings up a list of material types. Find bitmap and double click. Search through and find your texture that you made. Click ok. Now drag and drop the texture from the material editor onto your mesh.

Close the material editor. Hit F9, this does a quickrender, if everything went well, your mesh should be textured as you wanted it.

----THE SECRET OF THE BIPED-----

Here is another Direct Excerpt. This one from the Existing animation with MAX models (shirts, armour, robes, etc.) ~ Solved! thread.

First off, you're going to have to learn a little bit about Biped and Physique. Instead of going through a long discussion of how this works, I'm going to give you a link to a non-Morrowind Tutorial so you can brush up on the terminoligy and proceedures.

http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/zedaxis/learn/cstut01.htm

So, let's say you've made this new breastplate for your armour, but it looks funny on the character because it doesn't bend or twist like the other armour does.

1) Open up your max file (or create a new mesh) and attach all of your mesh pieces into one monolithic model. It may be possible to do this with separate meshes (which you add physique to separately), but I had problems with this. Give it a try, if you'd like, and report any successes/failures below. Remember that you'll have to add physique separately to each object if you do.

2) Create a new Biped object 128 max units tall. Change the spine seqments to 3 (from 4). The finger segments need to change as well, but I haven't tested the number. I've read from another poster that you need 2 fingers with 3 sements for 3rd person views and 5 fingers with 3 segments for 1st person views, but other than that, I think everything is default. If you want to use tail animations, I believe they are 3 segments.

3) Put the Biped object (Bip01) into figure mode and align it to origin. You need to move the small diamond shape to just below center. I've found that it works best around halfway between 0,0,0 and the grid mark just below. Be sure to follow the tutorial above on how to move and adjust the Biped... if you do it wrong, it can cause things to not work right.

4) Resize and align your mesh to the proper biped body parts. You can also move the biped limbs and such to better fit your model, if necessary. Basically, make sure things line up well.

5) This step is differnt than the tutorials you'll read about physique. Link your mesh to Bip01 (the biped object). There is a link button (looks like three chain links) in the upper left of the toolbar. Just click your mesh and drag to the diamond on the Biped. Your mesh will become a child object to Bip01.

6) Hide unused bones.

7) Add the Physique modifier to your mesh and attach it to the Biped object. In the dialog box, it's best to choose Rigid and No Blending.

8) Tweak your vertex weighting as it shows you in the tutorial. Only use the Green, Rigid type. You should see your mesh bend with the Biped model.

9) Export with the TES Exporter.

A few things I've noticed:

*Sometimes, when you select vertex under Physique, you don't get any vertex crosses. I've tried unhiding, etc., but nothing worked. It kept me from using the model properly, so I had to fix it or trash the model and start over. In the end, I created a copy of the model and that worked. Don't know why it happened, though...

*If you want to readjust your mesh vertices *after* you've applied Physique, then your going to have to delete Physique first. If you've spent a lot of time tweaking the weighting and aren't planning to *add* vertces, then simply save out a .phy file (disk at the top of the physique rollout), delete Physique, adjust your vertices, reapply Physique and reload your .phy file.

*If you want to *MOVE* your mesh after you've linked it to the Biped, you're going to have to *UNLINK* first. Before you unlink, you should probably delete Physique as well.

*You can attach vertices to any bone, not just the ones for the particular body part you're woking with.

*I tried to do multiple body parts in one max file with the hopes of hiding the models I didn't need when I saved... this didn't work. You're going to need to delete unneeded meshes before you export.

Have fun and happy modding!

-MD

---MODEL CREATION/EXPORTING-------

Modelling:

Ok, you hear a lot of talk about poly counts, and games suffering because of them. A good number of polys to shoot for on a weapon is about 500. That could be a little prohibiting, but that way, if you go over, you still have plenty of room before you get absurd, and if you dont go over, you're an efficient modeller. And dont underestimate the power of textures, a low poly mesh can be made exquisite with a detailed texture.

OK, so you've got your nice mesh, but it has lots of modifiers on it, which is not preferable for exporting(though it probably wont really mess ya up) So save your file. Then on your modifier stack, right click the top modifier and click collapse all. This will flatten all the modifiers into a simple editable mesh or editable poly.

Now, there are a ton of questions about allignment, and getting things to fit in morrowind, so I will try to cover this as in-depth as possible.

Scaling, Allignment, and Placement:

First thing you need to do is position the pivot so that the character will hold it correctly. To do this: click the hierarchy tab, the button looks sorta like a little 3 piece flow chart. Using the affect pivot only button, move your pivot so that it resides where the players hand should be. For two handed weapons, I believe it is placed in the center between where the two hands reside.

After you place the pivot, apply an xform modifier, this will allow you to properly scale, rotate and place the mesh.

As for placement, the mesh should be centered at 0,0,0. Since you placed your pivot already, it should place correctly by typing those values in. Using the top view. The head, or top of the weapon should be facing towards the top of your monitor, and the blade should be facing right(if it has a blade)

You will also need to scale your weapon appropriatly. Many a laugh have come from wielding gigantic building sized knifes. A typical morrowind npc is 128 max units tall. So you can judge the size of your weapon based upon that. Use the scale tool on the xform gizmo to properly scale your mesh down to the correct size in max units.

Once you are pleased with the size, collapse the mod stack again for a cleaner export.

A lot of the above relies on trial and error. So be patient when working, and try it a few times if it means it will be better.

Exporting:
You'll need the nif exporter I mentioned back in the texture tut, or the freedom force exporter for this.

Once your mesh is placed and scaled appropriatly, click file, and go down to export. Find the location you want to export to and scroll down in the export as menu to .NIF. Name your file and click save. This brings up the export box. There are lots of little details you can edit here. Some will be important when working with animation, but for most purposes, the default settings will do just fine. Once you've decided on settings click export. This will bring up the exort status window, which , for most normal statics and such, will just say export successful. You can then open the Construction set and set up an object using your mesh.

Special Modelling
Ok, there are a few types of special modelling that should be addressed. The first of these being no collision models.

Say you have a mesh that you want the player to be able to walk through. Maybe a waterfall or something. You have to turn off the collision for that mesh in max.

To do this, you create a box, or plane, I think any object will work, but I always use a box. In max, name that box "NoCollision" sans the quotes. I've heard that the nocol box wont show up, but I always hide mine anyway, just to be safe. When you export, you should see a message that says something like "NoCollision Object found at level 1" or something like that. That is how to make a no collision box.

Now, building on that, say you want to have a mesh that is nocollsion, but you want a piece of it to have collision. Use the above technnique to make the mesh nocollsion then You take the piece that you want to have collision and name it "Collision" sans the quotes. I'm pretty sure you can do this with more than one object in a mesh. You will get a message saying something like "Collsion object found" when you export.

Ok, now for some particle effects. I took this straight from the animation how-to thread. Cos its really good info and there is no use in me trying to explain it.

1. Creating the Material

- use the Blinn Shader
- add a bitmap to the diffuse map
- the bitmap should be:
- 32bit TGA, probably not bigger than 32x32 (even 16x16 is good for particles)
- TGA should have a pregenerated alpha channel
- the alpha channel set up in whatever art program should be black for transparent parts and white for solid parts or grays for translucent parts
- go to the opacity map and click on the button to add a map- but on the side bar switch from 'new' to 'editor' - find your diffuse map and select that. Tell MAX that this is an instance when asked
- if desired click on the checkered cube to tell MAX that you wish to see the texture in the viewport (note that transparencies don't usually show up in your viewport)

2. Creating a particle model

- create a plane, length and width of 1, 1 length and 1 width segments
- check generate mapping coordinates
- convert to a edit poly or edit mesh
- go to polygon subobject selection mod, select the poly, hold shift and rotate 180 degrees, say you are cloning to an element, exit poly mode
- apply the particle texture to your new object

3. Creating the Particle System

- create either a Blizzard or a Superspray particle
- Blizzard creates its particles from a 2 dimensional square
- the particles for Blizzard will 'fall' from a square
- Superspray creates its particles from a 1 dimensional point
- the particles for superspray will originate from your point creating either a 1D stream or by changing options it will spread out from this point in space
- apply the particle texture you made to your new particle system
- under particle type pick 'use instanced geometery', then find the pick object button, then select the particle you made
- under viewport settings (basic settings) for your particle change particles displayed to 100% and change it so it shows meshes in the viewport (this is a good way of keeping your particles toned down - if it really chokes your system then you're probably using too many particles for in-game purposes
- note that many options in MAX particle systems are ignored by the game including spin and rotate settings - particles seem to always face you in MAX and are always squares (the alpha channel transparency is what gives your particle a non square shape)
- settings you probably want to pay attention to:
- particle size. Now that your particle is a copy of that 1x1 plane you made you will have a good idea of how big it will be in Morrowind. A particle of size 1 is a tiny drop, a particle of size 128 would cover a person
- use rate - this determines how many particles are created - avoid numbers higher than 5 or so (but expirement) The amount of particles on screen at once results from this plus how long particles last
- Emit Start/Stop - what frame the particles start and stop at. Morrowind seems to like to play the particles in an infinite loop though, so in MAX you will see particles created for the space of time then disappear. Morrowind will do this over and over
- life - how long a particle lasts for - a value of 1 will cause particles to be huddle around the point of origin, disappearing quickly larger values allow the particles to expand out
- speed - how fast these particles spread out - very slow particles with very long lives create a dense particle field. Higher speeds will spread the particles out faster
- many places have a 'variation' variable - if you set this to like 50% then the values will vary by that much - adds to randomness and realism when used correctly and appropriately

4. Adding MAXProperties to your particle system

- select your particle system
- go to the utilities tab
- click on 'more' find the MAXProperties in the list and select that
- click on 'add' and select 'Zmode10='
- click on 'add' and select 'animated', check the BOOL box
- click on 'add' and select 'follow' check the BOOL box if you want the particles to use 'follow' or leave it unchecked
- particles that follow always stay with the particle system - so if you have a flaming sword it stays clustered around the sword
- particles that don't follow are 'on their own' once they are generated. A sword generating non-following smoke particles would leave a trail of smoke

5. Exporting

- hide your particle model (the little square you made)
- using the latest offical TES Exporter, export will default options...
- add your particle object art file in TES:CK, go into Morrowind and view your creation

6. Misc
- you can have more than one particle system at a time
- don't go too crazy with particles, try and keep the numbers of particles down
- much off the 'special' effect comes from how you design your .TGA
- under your particle material, in material editor - try setting the 'self illumination' value to something other than zero - at 100 the particle will glow at full intensity, at 10 the particle will glow dimly
- expirement a lot!
- using this method you will get a rough idea when you render in MAX how your particle system will look - however it will not be exactly the same in Morrowind!
- TES:CK can show the particles in some cases in the preview window, but they won't animate unless they are part of an animated object

and some corrections that Vilkacis Made:

Material

Use the TES Shader
You can use *.dds files as well
Apply your particle bitmap as Base map
For the fade effect apply a Particle Age map for Particle Color and Opacity in the maps rollout
Check Standard under Transparency Modes
Choose pure white as emmitance color

Particle System

No instanced geometry is needed
Pick Facing under particle type

---ANIMATION----

Staright From Rhedd's site, how to animate heads for morrowind.

ANIMATING FACES:

Animating faces in Morrowind is actually quite easy, all things considered. This little tutorial doesn't cover the complexities of 3DS Max, just the necessary steps to animating a face. I use Max 4.2, but this should work pretty much the same way in any version.

Step 1:
Build your face! It�s not in the scope this tutorial to explain how to do that. Make sure to build a basic inside to the mouth and teeth. Also put enough detail into the eyelids to allow for blinking. The head shouldn't need ears, since these come with the hairpieces. Make sure it�s completely finished and mapped before moving on. Try it out in-game first to make sure you like it.

Note: You�ll have to experiment with the size and shape of your first head, but I can help you out with where the pivotpoint should be. [Affect Pivot Only-Center to Object], then position the model at 0x, 0.715y, 52.122z. This centerpoint has worked fine for me so far. Make sure you [Affect Pivot Only-Align to World].

The same holds true for hair models, by the way. Just position them on your head and set their pivotpoint to the same coordinates.

Step 2:
Make two clones of your COMPLETED head. Name one of them something having to do with blinking. Give the other a name like �talking�. Edit the mesh of each of these models so that one has its eyes closed in a blink and the other has its mouth open as if talking. This is all the modeling that�s necessary. They should look something like this:

Step 3:
Now select your original head and apply a [Morpher] modifier to it. Load the talking head mesh into a morph channel, and the blinking head into another.

Step 4:
Now for the animation. The total animation should be set to 30 frames in length at 15 frames per second. The talk animation is going to run from frame 0 to 20, and the blink from 21 to 30. The eyes will be closed by frame 25 and open again by frame 30.

Adjust the morph sliders so that the talking morph is 0% at frame 0 and 100% at frame 20. Make sure it goes immediately back to 0% at frame 21 and STAYS that way for the rest of the animation.

Using the [Track View], you�ll need to adjust the [in] and [out] settings on each keyframe so that the mouth animation tension is a straight line from frame 0 to 20, then broken leaving frame 20.

Now set the blinking morph slider so that the eyes don�t move until frame 20, then 100% closed at frame 25, and completely open again on frame 30.

To get the blink timing exactly like the Bethesda models, the [in] and [out] settings for the keyframes is a bit more complicated. Just set them up so that the eyes are closed as long as possible. i.e.: frame 20 in=broken, out=fast ramp. Frame 25 in=slow ramp, out=slow ramp. Frame 30 in=fast ramp, out=broken.

It sounds more complicated than it is, and if you don�t understand the whole keyframe tension thing it won�t make a huge difference as long as the mouth opens from frames 0-20, snaps closed on frame 21, and the eyes close from 21-25 and open again from 26-30.

Step 5:
Open up the [Track View] and add a [Note Track] to the animated head model. You�ll need to add the following notes. The note should say exactly what�s in red below:
Frame 0 Talk: Start The mouth should be closed.
Frame 20 Talk: Stop The mouth should be fully open.
Frame 21 Blink: Start The eyes should be open and the mouth CLOSED.
Frame 30 Blink: Sto p The eyes should be open again.

Step 6:
That�s pretty much it! Now just select the animated head and [Export Selected] into Morrowind. Don�t export the two morph target heads, just the fully animated one.

Step 7:
Set up your new head as a body part in the editor and have fun!

To tell the truth, I would be stupid to restate all the good info that can be found in threads around here, but I can link them from here.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tesconstsethelp&Number=669347&page=&view=&sb=&o=&vc=1

http://www.elderscrolls.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=tesconstsethelp&Number=749001&page=&view=&sb=&o=&fpart=all&vc=1

and a good physique tutorial:
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/zedaxis/learn/cstut01.htm

Ok, that's all I have in me for tonight, I will add more as i think of it/come across it. Hope you found your answer. --Drendal.

_________________
Wizard Alliance Team Member

http://wizards-islands.com