Video Tutorial: Using 3DS and UpSpring

[Argh]

YouTube Link

Video walkthrough: covers export from Wings, import, setting up hierarchies, rescaling and fixing surface normals.

[Beherith]

I liked that, informative and clear.

[Argh]

Thank you, I apologize to all non-English speakers here, but I'm afraid I don't know anything past a cruddy smattering of German that wouldn't be useful

I guess I should do a second one about rotational nulls, etc. and final model prep / testing.

[smoth]

Using the rebuild the surface normal shit is sloppy and if you give 2 fucks about your model you should scale it first.

Also IE means in example, you misused the acronym :"we are going to rebuild it with a slightly higher IE more agrressive.."

otherwise not bad at all.

[Argh]

Using the rebuild the surface normal shit is sloppy and if you give 2 fucks about your model you should scale it first.

No. As the video clearly demonstrates, it's not necessary in the vast majority of cases.

In the very few cases where you might have a conflict (please note: I've had this problem exactly twice now, with over 300 models built), simply export the two sub-meshes as separate parts, then rescale the whole using the base mesh and rebuild the surface normals for each sub-piece before Merging them. The resulting merged Piece will retain the surface normal data from the sub-pieces. That gets around that problem neatly, and allows you to freely change the model until you finalize its scale.

[smoth]

I have a lot of models with mixed hard and curvy geometry. I see this go wrong all the time when I used the upspring settings this way. Many of your models have simple shape and form but this isn't true of all models and I will continue to tell people that it is wiser to scale outside of uspring over using that awful option of recalcing the normals.

[Argh]

I hear you on that, but I suspect that most of the time, it's just that you're trying to "round" stuff that shouldn't be rounded anyhow (< 5 sided columns, etc.). Instead, just keep it at 5, or preferably 6 sides, then the angle you have to use is low enough it won't screw up flats and hard edges. 6 really makes it easy, because then it's 61 degrees, which is usually comfortable.

Breaking the mesh up is so easy, though, and it means you don't have to worry about it at all until it's perfect in UpSpring. IDK, maybe that's a bigger problem in Wings than it is Rhino, but in Rhino, it's trivial. I'll look at that, see what you have to do to separate bits.

[smoth]

I tried this before with gundam models and it was horrible. Most pieces had to be broken into 4-5 pieces and forget about places where smooth and hard geometry have to blend.

[Argh]

I'll look at the workflow in Wings, see if there's a fast way. I really haven't had any serious problems with this, but I use more triangles for round things, too, because that prevents welding flaws.

OK, I see the problem- you apparently can't explode a mesh in Wings, because it wants a closed surface to work with. How lame, that's so trivial in Rhino. I'll keep poking at it.

[smoth]

you can. Use loop cut.

[Argh]

OK, took a look at the prep problem:

In Wings 1.2 Dev, just select the areas that need to be separated, select "Extract", select, "normal", hit Tab (for numeric input), hit ENTER. Voila, that area of the mesh is now a separated part. Repeat for other problem zones, and it's ready for export. Not as elegant as doing it in Rhino, but it works, and it's a bit faster than loop cutting (I think), because you can just do two zones- 'hard' and 'soft', then delete the master.

Just don't forget to .hole. the stuff that Wings produces to make the mesh contiguous.

[smoth]

the extract normal will also expand said piece.

use extract Y

extract...

hit tab

set it to 5 on y ..

say ok

delete old geometry now that new geometry has been created

select extracted piece...

move along y

hit tab

set to -5

rinse and repeat for all parts.


pain in the dick.

loopcut creates the hole and slices off the geometry at the same time

[Argh]

But you can just select the faces and make them .hole. in one step. And you don't need to move it at all, you just hide / show the groups you build.

Anyhow, that's not a pain, that's just basic mesh modeling stuff. Wings goes about it in a weird way, is all.

It'd take a whole two steps to prep it for UpSpring this way, and it's a lot faster than dicking with hard / soft in Wings, correcting scale, exporting in pieces via OBJ, etc., when you look at the steps it takes... and the quality is exactly the same.

[smoth]

all of this work instead of just setting up your normals and scale properly...

[Argh]

It's less work.

1. Select the areas to extract.

2. Mark holes.

3. Name.

4. Export.

VS:

1. Mark all edges for hard / soft, set all edges. Which takes quite awhile, because you have to select them by mesh edges.

2. Scale perfectly vs. scale reference.

3. Export, one Piece at a time, to OBJ.

4. Import, one Piece at a time, in UpSpring.

Same result, but one's an efficient process, in terms of workflow.

[SpliFF]

Thanks for putting that up. It gives me an idea of where the problem areas in 3ds->s3o lie. Let me see:

1.) UpSpring can't scale for shit. You have to save/reload and it still breaks your normals. You have to do this every time you change your model unless you get the scale right in wings or re-export as 3ds.

2.) Either UpSpring or 3ds doesn't support hierarchies stored in the file. In the video it looks like you saved s3o after you set them, presumably because exporting to 3ds would have lost them again.

3.) UpSpring should really rename the 'base' object for you and make everything a child, even if they aren't nested themselves (saves at least 3 operations).

The question I have (for anybody who knows) is does Wings+3ds support hierarchies? Can you setup a hierarchy in Wings, save to 3ds, then load in Wings with the hierarchies preserved?

[Argh]

Wings doesn't do hierarchies, so far as I know.

3DS does support hierarchies in Max, but most modeling software can't support export as 3DS that includes that feature of the file format, so it's a problem. But the bigger issue is that OBJ supports named parts, but UpSpring doesn't handle them correctly, and just imports one giant mesh unless you import them one at a time.

Yes, scaling causes problems in UpSpring, and, in general, doesn't handle surface normals correctly by default. It shouldn't have these problems, but it does, hence all the bitching and moaning about that stuff.

If you're fixing things about UpSpring that are a pain in the ass, one of the biggies is that it doesn't use file extensions on loading or saving. You have to write it out by hand.

Overall, though... these things are minor wrinkles. UpSpring's workflow is actually pretty damn fast, if you know what you're doing. It took longer to talk about what to do than to do it, and that goes double or even triple for setting up rotational points... which is why I'm incredibly dubious about doing it by hand with a text file, vs just grabbing the points and moving them with a mouse with 1:1 feedback and proper displacement if the model's rescaled later.

[Peet]

which is why I'm incredibly dubious about doing it by hand with a text file, vs just grabbing the points and moving them with a mouse with 1:1 feedback and proper displacement if the model's rescaled later.

I highly doubt that nobody will build a simple hierarchy-builder for the new model system...heck it might even be me if I stop being lazy and busy.

[Argh]

Well, that'd be great, but as I said, it's one of those "little things" that, imo at least, needs to exist before this overall idea is an actual improvement.

Visual editing in a WYSIWYG environment is very important, in terms of workflow. Doing it by hand, for more than the simplest model, would be a huge pain in the ass.

[SpliFF]

I have nothing against GUIs, especially when there's artists involved. It seems a common misconception (which you've been instrumental in spreading) that I'm advocating doing it all by hand.

How you create data and how you store data are entirely different issues.

Many of the operations you outlined could probably be done in your original modelling software or even in Spring itself, should the right interfaces be developed. However that's another conversation for another thread and really has little to do with the issues I was raising here (which is the relative capabilities and bugs of UpSpring, 3DS and Wings).

But the bigger issue is that OBJ supports named parts, but UpSpring doesn't handle them correctly, and just imports one giant mesh unless you import them one at a time.

How is that a bigger issue, and why all the underlining. Is there any software of note that doesn't support both? Is there something obj can do but 3ds doesn't? In short, is direct OBJ support in UpSpring really that important?