vi363R

YES! alright, don't know what happened to me yesterday, for sure it was time to sleep  problem was in the script and then the PNG texture file was not a power of two (3k) and after correcting all of those mistakes it worked. What a relief, I was not ready for going back to 2.79b after getting used to the newer versions..

I do think that the trick with '_png' as texture name might not be working for shoes, I had to use a specific PNG name and then it went just fine. I was able to use the same script to make the necessary corrections to scene file after exporting from Blender 3.6 and using CTK.

A whole new world opens with this leap forward. Thanks for helping! Now she can go shopping for shoes as well! OMG

Amazing! Thanks for the quick reply. That was indeed the issue.. solved  great. Apparently there's also something going on with the textures where there is a difference with the flow for clothes but that may be related to my Blender version (3.6) and CTK.. Will test that later and see if it makes a difference using 2.79b. Time's up for today.

Thanks for your help!

Hi there, I'd like to ask a question... probably there's a silly thing I'm still missing here... Is there anything else worth mentioning besides the things you mentioned in the hidden content? The weights have to be applied in the pose of feet and legs as they are in the host file?

is it somewhere else one needs to indicate it's high heels? so the armature changes pose? I notice that with other high heels in the game, the feet change pose, and they don't do that yet with the ones I made.. very curious

It seems the heels in the picture are in that pose of the host, only the legs are not.. any ideas would be appreciated! thanks in advance

6 hours ago, HDiddy said:

This is cool if you are going to use Blender to paint 3D objects, but there are more efficient ways of doing this.

For starters there is a tool that combines normals fairly easily called ncombiner which works rather well. ncombiner.zip both images must be the same resolution but it works.

The better option would be using a more robust 3D painting application.  I use Substance Painter but Pervokpetr was a big user of Quixel Mixer which is free. Blender IMO while it can do the job just makes things complex. With substance you can layer normals, height maps, etc...including modifying levels and other fine tuning with a simple drag and drop.

Basically if you are serious about texturing.....get a decent texturing tool.  Don't fuss around with Blender.

 

 

Right, thanks, Quixel Mixer sounds like something to try out indeed.

6 hours ago, drmls said:

Thanks but there is no link for Nvidia Hairworks viewer there!  What link should I choose for that?

the hairworks plugin for 3ds max 2018 is available on nvidia's site, link is in the details: https://developer.nvidia.com/gameworksdownload#?search=hairworks it's the first one listed.

the secons one, hairworks 1.2.1 is the one that i included, standalone viewer, unrelated to 3ds max version

53 minutes ago, drmls said:

Can you give link to that file?

Yeah of course, not sure if it's allowed her but anyway: I got it from here. It's a Vietnamese site and the installation instructions are in Russian but I got it to work (procedure is identical to that for 2014 version). This is also an interesting read ;-).

Did it work out with Mega for you?

For anyone who cares: Fshare is hosting a working 2018 version.

On 11/24/2023 at 1:03 PM, drmls said:

Thank you!  I wish you added a tutorial on how to edit Hairworks Hair symmetrically on this Growth Mesh so that we could create symmetrical Hairworks without having to comb both sides of the particle systems separately.  Please add that tutorial to this superior post!

Hi I'm seriously considering diving deeper into the hairworks universe.. currently installing 3DS Max with Hairworks plugin, hope to find out all there is to find out related to hairworks now, including collision spheres and all of that... hold on thight

57 minutes ago, TTomBBlack said:

Which Python version are you using?

Python Version Blender 3.5.1:
3.10.9 (main, Dec  8 2022, 14:09:03) [MSC v.1928 64 bit (AMD64)]

Thanks, think I will try this out with one of my upcoming ports. Does it have weights of the default body? Or Fbv2?

59 minutes ago, HDiddy said:

Already included in the pack

Omg now I see it- great! Looking forward to testing it when I get back from holidays! 
 

and it will be also great for testing the hair works plug-in with it!

This could be interesting indeed, now first finding a version of Max will be the next challenge

21 hours ago, john374 said:

thanks! very easy and simple to set up. unfortunately i get an error when i try to add more than 100 png files, and i've been able to add a lot more to the GUI version. I've been adding more each time, trying not to crash it and currently processing about 2,000. still, command line and scripts will be useful with all of the options. thanks for explaining.

here's something similar, using Image magick, its a recursive script so test very carefully in a 'sandboxed' folder with backups. basically doing the same thing but with the option to resize stuff. I use this to resize all PNG's in unzipped addons to 32x32, and then zipping them again, also with a batch script.. Image Magick needs to be installed first... (https://imagemagick.org/index.php)

this is not drag and drop, but by double clicking the batch, it will execute in it's current folder, and all subfolders, potentially sweeping your entire activemod folder... but test wisely first  please 

////////////////////

for /r "./" %%a in (*.png) do (
magick mogrify -resize 2048x2048^> -format png +dither -colors 256 PNG8:"%%~a"
)
pause

//////////////////////////////

16 hours ago, john374 said:

thanks! very easy and simple to set up. unfortunately i get an error when i try to add more than 100 png files, and i've been able to add a lot more to the GUI version. I've been adding more each time, trying not to crash it and currently processing about 2,000. still, command line and scripts will be useful with all of the options. thanks for explaining.

Yes there’s a limit to what a batch script can process, I usually process like 1 type of addon or room at a time. 
Sometimes I use recursive scripts, without drag and drop, to include nested folders but is also a bit tricky

3 hours ago, john374 said:

hey, could you explain briefly how to use the command line version and this script on our activemod folder? the GUI version seems pretty limited and to us laymen these github projects can sometimes seem like they're written in an alien language

Hi yes sure:

1 go to https://pngquant.org/ and download the command-line binary for windows
2 this gives you a zip file called pngquant-windows.zip 
3 extract it into a folder
4 in that folder create a new empty text file (using right click context menu
5 rename the new text file's extension to .bat
6 right click it and choose edit (opens notepad) or edit with notepad++ if you have that
7 in the file copy-paste the script above (everything between and excluding the lines of slashes.

8 save as .bat

9 drop png file(s) on the batch script (or a shortcut to it)  to optimize the files

note: pngquant.exe needs to be in the same folder than the script .bat file

There are some options in the script
- strip removes metadata (which is not required)
- speed Speed/quality trade-off from 1 (brute-force) to 10 (fastest). The default is 3. Speed 10 has 5% lower quality, but is 8 times faster than the default. I use 7.
- force to overwrite without prompt
- ext .png for the extension, otherwise default extesion will be or8.png
- verbose to see what it's doing
- skip if larger is quiet obvious, only overwrite file if smaller
- the 16 is the amount of colors you like to have in the output, minimum is 2, I vary between 4 and 256, depending on the texture, for most basic clothes it can be really down to 8, 16 or 32, good thing is: it keeps transparency, even with very low amount of colors 
- pause keeps the windows batch window open when operation is complete

during testing, keep backups!! cannot be undone.

hi @sexybastardo, thanks for the tip, I've created some batch scripts for the command line version, which works a bit faster than the application. also drag and drop (on the script). example below:

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

@echo off
set path=%~d0%~p0
:start
"%path%pngquant.exe" --strip --ext .png --force --speed 7 --skip-if-larger --verbose 16  %1
shift
if NOT x%1==x goto start
pause

///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

note: pngquant.exe needs to be in the folder of the script file

@sexybastardo that would be awesome. thanks

If something like that would exist for addons, that would be even more so!  

On 1/25/2022 at 8:18 AM, drmls said:

Thank you for sharing this file.  This might also overcome symmetry problems during combing, I think.  I'll definitely try it.

Good luck! I hope it works out for you, HW007_vi363R_2 and HW007_vi363R_4 were made with this.. HW007_vi363R_3 is work in progress

Check out BRU and look no further

bulk rename utility

https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk

hello,

Decoding .[bs*] to .bs works fine.

Editing in notepad++ also but

when I encode .bs to .[bs*] it produces an empty file..

any ideas to solve this?

much apprecieated, thanks