How 2 3DS Max?

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Hey gang. So I've taken up the venture of modeling, but have no idea what I'm doing. My first goal is to finally retexture a set of Ayleid ruins to be like new (which I started soooooooo long ago )

One thing I need though, is a bridge endcap because the only current endcap consists of rubble. I figure the Camoran's Paradise bridge would be more than perfect because it has more detail than the other bridges anyways. I'd just keep that.

So I gave it a shot. What I did was I made a duplicate of the original bridge model, then rotated it 90 degrees, and cropped away the parts that stuck out for both meshes. What I don't know how to do, however, is to fine tune it and actually make it look good.

This is how it looks so far. You can probably see what I'm generally trying to do with it.



Highlighted here, you can see the two different bridge models that I used to make this endcap. The blue is the original, the red is the rotated and cropped one.



What I need to do is figure out how to merge the parts of the mesh. Here are the independent pieces (Or nodes, or objects, or whatever they're called. I don't know. Different parts with different textures) that I'd like to figure out how to merge together, so they can blend well with shading and all that. I'd like to connect the blue and the red, the green and the orange, and the purple and the yellow. And still manage to fill those gaps.



If any veteran modelers out there know any tricks with 3DS Max and would like to give an explanation, that would help a ton. As a reward, I'll give you a free bridge endcap model I guess

[Koniption]

IATE,

I sent you a personalized tutorial, of sorts. Check your PM inbox.

Koniption

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Thank you very much Koniption. You truly are a big help. I'll try what you said down to the letter, and see how it ends up. If all goes well, everyone gets a free bridge and I come closer to having some sort of idea what I'm doing

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Alright, so I followed what you said to do, and the mesh (for the most part) is finished.



However, a few areas (which I have highlighted in red below, and also behind the blocks with a blue glow, obscured by the camera angle) are UV disasters. (The one square on the second column there is my bad, I can fix that easily. Used the wrong part of the mesh to fill that hole ) Essentially, all of the places where I added new polygons. However, for a few places where I fill a new polygon in a place completely surrounded by vertices that belong only to that same piece of the mesh, they end up fine. I believe it may be caused by me connecting new polygons to vertices that belong to other pieces, and the program doesn't know how to line them up. What I am left with are a bunch of floating triangles that aren't connected to any other part of the UV map. Part of the problem is that even though I can attach two pieces of the mesh together, they aren't truly merged, and they share different UV maps. I need to figure out how to truly merge the pieces together into single objects (see colorful image above to see which ones I am talking about)



In addition, attaching some of them together resulted in them becoming blocky. How do I go about making them smooth again?

[Koniption]

Hmmm, here is a *recommended* "final steps to exporting" document that Razorwing made for me a looong time ago:

Razorwing's Model & Collision Exporting Steps

Before exporting a model there are a few steps one should always make in my opinion:

1) Select all the meshes and collapse them to editable mesh.(Edit by KP: Collapse option collapses all meshes together. They then become one mesh, truly. With collapse, if the meshes use different dds texture files, then once collapsed, the combined meshes will take on only one of the multiple textures that might have been used. Therefore, this option is best to collapse ONLY meshes that use the exact same dds texture file.The "Collapse" option is in the Utilities panel, if I remember correctly)

2) Select all the meshes again and and reset their xform. This is done on the Utilities pane. If you don't see a button called Reset Xform, click the More... button and select it in the list.

3) Attach all the meshes to one another, by picking one and then under the Edit Geometry rollout, click the button Attach List and select everything in the list and click the attach button. You will likely be given a popup called Attach Options. Always select the "Match Material IDs to Material" radio button, and always tick the checkbox "Condense Material and IDs". If you have two meshes with the same material, this operation will condense them into one mesh when the model is exported and is really good for optimization. (By KP: did you select the "Match Material IDs to Material" and the "Condense Material and IDs"? If not, collapsing should still do the trick since your multiple meshes all use the same dds texture file.)

4) Weld all the vertices of the combined model by going to the Edit Geometry rollout and weld selected 0,1.

5) Center to object the combined model's pivot point. This is done on the Hierarchy pane; first depress the button Affect Pivot Only and then click the button Center to Object.

6) When you select the model in "Select and Move" mode, are the XYZ values at the bottom of the screen anything else than zeroes? If so, copy-paste or write the numbers into a text document and then move the model to X0, Y0 and Z0.

7) Add a Smooth modifier to the combined model and tick the checkbox Auto Smooth. (By KP: this should take care of your "blockiness" issue)

8) Then reset the combined model's Xform, and then collapse it to editable mesh.

9) Finally, if you moved the ship to origin in a preceeding step, select all your collision and group it. Now go to the Hierarchy pane, depress Affect Pivot Only, but instead of centering the pivot, enter the numbers you got from the ship's original position into the XYZ boxes. This will move the collision's pivot point to the center point of where your ship model used to be. Now go into Select and Move mode, and move the collision group to X0, Y0 and Z0. Now you've moved the collision exactly the same distance you moved the ship, and you can simply ungroup the collision again.

Regards,
Razorwing
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Be sure to tell me if this solves most of your issues.

As far as messed up UVmaps, you very well might have to redo the uvmap manually on the messed up parts:

http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/...w_mapping/

http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/...e_stealth/

....another option is to select a group of polygons that are similar in size, shape, and texturing looks as what you want to use to replace the badly uVmapped area, then "disconnect" that group of polygons, duplicate/clone it, then move that duplicate to the area you want to use it on (be sure to delete the badly UVmapped polygons, first), align it, and lastly weld the vertices of it to the main bridge mesh in the right spots (self-explanatory, I hope).

Koniption

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Koniption, you have been an absolute lifesaver :goodjob:



I followed your advice, and the model came out looking pretty well. There is, however, one last issue.

It turns out after all that there may not have been an issue with blockiness. What I may have been seeing is this last annoyance I have now. I UV mapped it all, and it's pretty much seamless all around. I'm very happy with that part and that tutorial you linked was very helpful (Even though this model is slightly more complicated than the one in the guide )

I believe the problem this time is the shading (Vertex shading? Is that the term?) It happened when a previously shaded vertex became connected with an unshaded vertex from the rotated segment or when I created new polygons next to shaded vertices. If you can't see all of them in the image above, here they are pointed out, highlighted in red.



But other than that, it looks nice, it has proper collision, and it tiles nicely with the other bridge model.

[Koniption]

To fix the vertex shading, when something like that happens:

Select the badly shaded verteces, then slide their vertex color all the way to white. This resets the shading for those vertices.

After you do this, you can then reshade the vertices in any black/grey color you need to make them match up again to other parts, if need be.

You can do this under the Editable Mesh -> "Vertex" -> then look in the listing of options below this for "Vertex color" or "shading", something like that.


Secondly:
Also, you might have two "side-by-side" vertices that are so close together, that they look like one vertice (in other words, aren't properly welded). If only one of those vertices are shaded, and the neighboring one is not, you can also end up with the effect you have. Same thing can happen with a shaded vertice that has been aligned virtually seamlessly with a neighboring edge, so that it looks like the edge is subdivided, but in fact, it's a separate edge with a neighboring edge's vertice moved and aligned into the middle of it. So also be sure to check for that, if first method above does not help you.

Koniption

[IAMTHEEMPEROR]

Thank you so much Koniption for showing me the basics. With that knowledge, I think I can start experimenting more with other models and soon, perhaps, make some of my own

This is the finished bridge I suppose. There are still a few bugs with the vertex shading here and there, but at this point I don't really think they matter.



If anyone wants it, just let me know. I'd attach it here, but apparently I can't.

[Koniption]

No problem. I had some time, so I was able to help walk you through some of the stuff I've learned.

I don't personally need a bridge end cap, tbh. I don't think it's suitable for Blackmarsh mod that I work on, neither. Not sure if we use Ayleid stuff, anyway.

But the bridge looks nice now!

Koniption