xxpy02

@hfg2 I was a bit lazy to go straight for face normals/uv coords and tried my luck with the adjacent vertex and well, it worked. If it wasn't for your suggestions, I wouldn't have done it.

Being able to output data optimized exactly like the originals...

@vi363R I never used AI before (not even for code suggestion/copilot), but the biggest issue might be finding one that can interpret the current code and make suggestions on it - mostly because a good amount of input data is required for the algorithm to run. But it makes sense, I should give it a try at some point.

@hfg2 you mean that the algorithm may be using the face normals (that could be generated by the mikktspace algo) for sorting the vertices? So probably by taking the dot product between the face normals and choosing the vertex from the face that more closely points towards the same direction? The idea on using the UV diagonals/seams could work too.

I don't really mean to turn quads into tris actually, I am keeping whatever comes. "Triangulation" was probably a poor choice of word to describe the scenario at hand, but I am not a native english speaker thus I often lack the vocabulary to clearly communicate. What I am trying to accomplish is finding the correct surveying algorithm (position/proximity triangulation). I really meant to assess neigboring faces/edges and find what shared vertex index to pick for a given face.

In the original meshes two identical edges are collapsed into one. Given you could have multiple faces sharing the same vertex N, this vertex N will have multiple different indexes in the EdgePointArray; at most one for each edge. My issue was trying to come up with a common factor by which to "survey/triangulate" the other faces (and find some "proximity" factor) to sort the vertices and pick the one that is closer to the current one. But your suggestions are good candidates for this regardless, I'll give them both a try.

I've been struggling to generate a exact copy of the MeshStructure.FaceEdgeArray. For some reason I can't find the proper triangulation algorithm when picking an index from the EdgePointArray when there are multiple matches for the same vertex.

For instance, when you look into the the body01.bs and group its FaceEdgeArray by faces (by using the MeshStructure.FaceLengthArray), you'll see something like this between faces 77 and 79:

[378, 235, 369, 375]
[380, 351, 382, 365]
[371, 381, 363, 384]

This is what my script generates right now at the same face positions:

[378, 235, 369, 371]
[380, 351, 382, 365]
[375, 381, 363, 384]

Both 375 and 371 (in blue) point to the same vertex in the end, but at different positions in the EdgePointArray. This happens everywhere in the array, its quite common.
When looking at the original bodies, it seems that the algorithm sometimes will pick the first or the second index, but I could not figure out what's the criteria for it.
I've tried different things, but if I change something to fix one in particular I'll get others swapped somewhere else.

In the end it doesn't really matter if they are swapped or not as they will always point to the same vertices regardless. But I really wanted to get a perfect optimization algo for this.
Does anyone have the smallest clue that could help with this?

35 minutes ago, HDiddy said:

@xxpy02

How about this to help me understand your point.  If I wanted to simply take a Daz dress and make it an addon for the game.  What about Blender 3.6 will make this easier?

I am probably wrong (I know nothing about Daz), but if you're using Daz for all your creation process then I feel like Blender acts more as a bridge between Daz and CTK than the creation tool itself. In that case, I don't think versions matter much indeed - Blender ends up only being an annoyance.. That being said, I'd look for a way to export a correctly formatted .dae straight from Daz for CTK to use. That way you wouldn't even need to bother using Blender.

But don't listen to me, just stick with what works best for you I guess. It's all a matter of personnal preference. Bottom line is I am working on this addon and wanted feedback on what I could add to it to make modding easier - that's it. What you use is up to you.

I saw what you're capable of creating even with 2.79b, imagine being able to use 3.6 for everything.

I was really focusing on other things, but if you needed weights exported back you could have just told me; I'll be glad to help you with that.

The past few days I've been working like crazy and I didn't had time to reply, but I appreciate all your feedback on this thread. Sorry in advance the the long reply.

On 10/23/2023 at 8:55 PM, HDiddy said:

If you mean modding being done on Blender versions 2.79, etc...

That's one of the things. The newer Blender versions have many useful plugins (and core features are far better) which we cannot rely on just because we're stuck with older ones for modding. Also tutorials for recent versions are abudant, that is one of the factors that might hold back begginers.

On 10/23/2023 at 8:55 PM, HDiddy said:

If you are specifically referring to Bodies.  Well maybe so, however one of the reasons Body Modding never caught on was incompatibility to clothes.

There are many good bodies already and non-human characters is very niche. I believe those two play a big role in that as well.

On 10/23/2023 at 10:18 PM, Smoke said:

I tend to avoid these questions because I fell that 99% of the time, people take my 'to the point' logic thinking as a insult or they plainly deny my response because they think that I 'don't know' what I'm saying and/or its counter productive.

No offense taken, not even a single one. I was really asking for your opinions and feedback, not to agree with me. I wanted to know what I could focus on in order to help.

On 10/23/2023 at 10:18 PM, Smoke said:

There is NO magic bullet. There are scripts and tools that can help you but at the end...

(omitted for brevity)

Again - magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. The best solution is for people to create their work flow, something that is comfortable towards them. The process is unforgiving if you make a mistake, plain and simple - and I think that is what breaks people to 'move on'. 

I think the biggest hurdle is that people CANNOT use CTK correctly. CTK was the tool that literally made modding easier. Personally, it probably need a better guide. Or the current guide needs to be cleaned up so people can understand it.

That pain you see in beginners is exactly what I am talking about. If the tools are complicated and because of that you can easily break the game, that's something worth of enhancement. There's no "this cannot be improved" thing when we're talking about software development, that's my point in the thread.

Ideally you'd simply import, do your changes and export using a single addon - nothing else. It isn't like that because no one ever dared to try and do it.

On 10/23/2023 at 10:18 PM, Smoke said:

Not sure what you mean. But if you can create a tool that will perfectly apply/create weights on addons. Well - I would call that revolutionary.

You wouldn't even need to worry about vertex weighting or smoothing in latest Blender versions (even 2.8 would do). There's a bunch of plugins that handle that for you:

• Voxel Heat Diffuse Skinning
• Surface Heat Diffuse Skinning
• Corrective Smooth Baker

(and I am may have covered just half -if not less- of them)

On 10/25/2023 at 3:43 AM, hfg2 said:

If you go and publish on github I could submit bugs/patches/improvements. At least in theory.

Your project with the modding tools is highly appreciated by me, is nice to see people that starts implementing Nodes as objects/classes and working on high versions of Blender as well. Also are good for study.

I am currently using a private repositoy on BitBucket, mostly because I've been rebasing the history a lot throughout the massive refactoring I'm performing on the addon. It is completely different already - you won't even recognize the bs* parsing/node walking algorithm in version 2.0.0 (once it goes out) coming from 1.2.0.

But yeah, there's no point in keeping it private for much longer as I am wrapping up the refactoring. If you want I can send you a heads up with the repo when I make it public.

On 10/25/2023 at 3:43 AM, hfg2 said:

You are very dedicated to the stock bodies which I consider inferior bodies, but if your project can export custom bodies (like exporting materials, textures and the rest of nodes like CollaTkane does, not constrained in the old local_XXX numbers) then I will be interested in including this in my bodies exporter.

But I'm kinda done at this point with the game as it is, I personally would like to switch to something else because of the issues I've encountered (limitations in the engine and frequent crashes due to high textures sizes I'm using). I'm not saying that I've abandoned the game for good, but for now I would like to focus on alternatives, because a lot of the tools I've built over time I think can be adapted and reused for other engines with little effort and is a pity not to do so.

It started with original bodies, but just because I wanted to completely change them lol. I need to be able to customize anything from Blender. Subdivide and keep it high poly, customize materials, shader parameters (specular, reflection, etc) and whatnot. Being able to change materials would solve the issue with big textures, since we could break the "skin" into multiple images and assign them to different parts of the body (eg: 4 textures of 1024px, each one for a part of the body - top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right). But that's trivial, the smallest use case that can definitely be automated.

On 10/25/2023 at 9:18 AM, Driver said:

What I like about your addon is, how simple it is. As far as just editing mesh of game items concerns, things are quite easy. Just to import an item/move vertices/export it. Blender is a very much difficult application to use for a beginner, but if you concentrate on only this, you'll need just an hour to learn.

I like to consider things as simple as I can, and the first step should be as simple as it can be. If you want a body shape, import body and reshape it, export and test it. You want something to put on, import a cloth from your game and reshape it, export and you can enjoy it.

This is what our game has long missed.

Thanks for the feedback. I feel exactly the same. When I started it took me so much time to figure out what addons I needed and how to use them that I almost quit (using Blender was actually the easy part). Most addons have too many useless UI stuff when you only need a simple import/export. Also, relying on external tools (blex, t**, ctk, etc) is a complete deal breaker for me. I really like having only those two buttons (import and export) and I am not planning to add any extra ones so soon.

Even though I am completely new to the forum I know TK17 for quite some time now (known as "S**Villa" back then) and just picked it up again to mess around after a decade (or more).

I found that Hook5 is a great and much welcomed improvement to the graphics and so I got pretty excited to start doing more with it, but I am more into creating unique content than downloading addons and playing with them.

Thing is, everything related to modding seems pretty outdated/ancient, very limited or plain hard to use (when it actually works). This is the reason why I started working on this body addon for the latest version of Blender.

So I just wanted to get a general feedback from the community modders, those who are actively creating and uploading content (free or paid):

• Is that the same feeling for you?
• Do you think this hinders your creativity/productivity and therefore you get uninspired to do more?
• Maybe the learning curve for beginners is too sharp so they get disapointed and move on?
• Would refreshing/updating our toolset help inspire more modders?
• Or simply adding more features to the existing addons/tools be enough?

I plan on working on the addon I mentioned above with a long term goal of it being a more general tool, that's why I ask all these questions. I want to gather feedback to see where my help would be better suited. Or in other terms: I don't want to spend time on something no one needs/wants - I'd much rather use my skills to help others achieve more. That's the reason I went for a bodies addon, because CTK seems to do a pretty good job for everything else although not being too user/beginner friendly.

It'd be great to help this community grow, so all your feedback is appreciated.

Fit models with small curves

R5 5600

RTX 2060

32gb DDR4 CL16

1.5gb NVMe

HOOK5: Yes

Hello