Replies: 17 comments 57 replies
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I agree that Collada's time has come and gone, and with FBX being closed source, using an open source alternative such as USD or glTF sounds great! (Even better that glTF is already implemented, thanks to @Soreepeong's work!) My thoughts on your points:
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glb file is essentially a concatenated file of gltf and bin files, but with length information stored. I found myself ending up using glb exclusively once I got the textual part of the format working. Also, it would be nice to have .editorconfig so that we won't have to "fight" automatic formating to keep the code format consistent! |
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Thanks for the input! Here's a AC list that I'll add to a 2.0 issue:
My Cryengine Importer project will get its own set of issues to deal with the upgrade, since at the end of the day I need to be able to make mechs dance, otherwise what is even the point of all this! 🤣 |
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.caf format will be present in convertion options? |
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Well, this is a bit more of a challenge than I expected. With Collada, it was relatively easy to go from Cryengine -> Collada -> Blender, since everything was Z axis up. With gltf, it only knows Y axis up, so I have to convert the Cryengine data to that axis when I write it, and then hope the gltf importer from Khronos handles it from there. But unfortunately when I import something, it wants to use -Y as the forward direction instead of Y. That may not be a problem, but it probably will be when dealing with prefabs. I'm guessing everything will be rotated around facing the wrong direction. I think I'll just live with -Y being front for gltf models and when working on the prefab importers, just rotate them around there. I still need to verify that child geometry is placed correctly, add VertsUvs, and double check vertex Colors since those seem a bit weird too. But making progress at least! |
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Take a look at SwapAxes.cs and see if you can get things right there! |
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Oh nice! I was wondering how all the animations and armatures were working! I wrote a couple of dumb extensions for |
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Honestly that class still doesn't make much sense for me else than axis changing for position; I almost was trying all the possible permutation of axes. Hope you get better mileage than me! |
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Not having too much luck so far. Feels like such a needle in a haystack. One of these 3 hula girls is from the Collada import (rotated 180 around Z to face the same direction), and the other 2 variations with using I'll keep poking around. Having known good Collada values to compare against helps a lot at least. |
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Got the star citizen models importing correctly. Everything is still flipped with -Y being forward, but I think I can fix this by just taking the negative of it when it's first read. Hopefully that won't break animations too badly. |
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Got the rotations fixed for all child nodes, and positive Y is forward again. I'm assuming this will break animations, but need to work on the Ivo files first, then will get that going next. Making progress! |
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Great! |
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I think I found a way to combine the split DDS texture files for the newer game models so they go straight into the I gotta stop getting sidetracked though. 😳 |
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CryEngine and glTF have different uses for some of texture channel layouts though; did you find a solution for that too? MSFT DDS extension does exist but I'm not sute if that can be used meaningfully here. |
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Haven't looked at that yet, but will take a peek. It would be really nice to get accurate materials right as part of the conversion, but I'm worried that texture files are studio dependent and it may be hard to get a general converter for them. For example, the normal files for MWO don't use the regular red and blue channels, but instead use blue and green. Why? I don't know, but it means that normal files need custom nodes to work properly for those models. 🤷 |
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Ok, weird one here. For some models, the Normal datastream has the normals as a 4 byte structure. For example: I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a |
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Without more context, I can only guess, but maybe it's a Quat, with each axis compressed into a single byte? So X would be 0/255, Y is 80/255, Z is FF/255, and w is 1F/255? (Alternatively, WXYZ...) You would then convert the Quat into a Vec3. |
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The existence of FF and 80 makes it difficult to take the values as either SNORM, UNORM, or 2's compliment. In either case the values involve either 1 or -1, and it makes the Vec3 or Quat/Vec4 so not normalized, which I think would be unlikely. |
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Oh wow, just discovered the glTF plugin for VS Code. It's so nice! It can validate the gltf and glb files, and even has a 3d viewer built in! This is so much nicer for verifying models are converting properly than looking at them in notepad++ and then loading into Blender. 🤤 |
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Starting to get textures figured out. Star Citizen doesn't use names, but rather texture slots. I'm trying to figure out what each of them are.
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In regards to normal maps; I've run into instances where some games developers decide to omit the blue channel, and recalculate it's values at runtime, and others will invert the channel, since the blue channel is mostly white anyways. Either way, they're storing a mostly black channel, rather than a mostly white channel, which will eventually save them quite a bit of texture space. (None of the ones I've found were CryEngine games, but that may be happening with MWO...) Does the glTF NEED to contain the textures inside it? Couldn't it just reference the textures relative to the source input file, and the extracted textures are placed next to their origin files? That would make it library friendly... |
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It can refer to textures specified by relative paths, but importing it on Blender would always add files as new textures afaik. |
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Yeah, it would, but a simple script can condense texture references to a single reference. |
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I think that is how it's going to have to be done, with a script. When a gltf model is imported into a scene as part of a script, it'll need to check for duplicate textures with that name, point the material to use that, and then delete the duplicate texture. A bit annoying, but I think that will be a workable solution. |
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FYI - I've been hacking at much of this in Starfab, however texture slots are not consistent across all shader types. There's additional work that needs to be done with the textures under the hood. Not as simple as plugging in each texture to a PBR channel. |
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HI! Any update on new release? |
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I've been stuck for the last month trying to get the armatures working in gltf files for skins. I just can't get the orientation right. It's driving me nuts. :(
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Is it something root bone orientation? or the animation itself? |
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Yeah, I wouldn't mind a pair of fresh eyes on this. I think it's in the Once this is lined up properly (it's in Edit mode in the screenshot), I'll work on the bind pose matrix (so the skinning has the proper weights), and then finally to animations. It's easy in Collada because it's all Z up coordinates along with Blender, but gltf is Y up, so I have to go from Z up to Y up and back. I'm attaching the chicken collada file for reference. The model is from Armored Warfare under |
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@Markemp i'm trying to get access to the chicken model. Yet i cant find how to extract Armored Warfare files. If using Quickbms, you have a bms script for me? |
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Eh... maybe Collada is the way to go after all... 🤔 |
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I think I got this to work. Had to make a few changes since the scene and node layout changed a bit (bones aren't supposed to be children of the nodes, so did some refactoring there). But here's the MWO adder armature doing it's thing!
Going to do some more testing, but this is looking very promising! |
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I'm still not sure this is right. The geometry when imported into Blender is off from the Collada imports, for models like the MWO hula girl and the Cryengine green fern. And I'm not sure why. Is it reasonable to think that, if I take a Z up, Y forward model from Cryengine, convert it without changing the transform to Y Up, and then the glTF importer brings it back in to Blender would undo those changes, but it just doesn't work out right. Maybe the glTF inporter in Blender isn't right. I dunno. I'll just keep going down this path for now, and hopefully I won't run into too many things that are broken. |
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Yeah, this method won't work. :( Ugh, what a pain. Back to the drawing board. |
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@Markemp can you send me the model? I'd take a look during this week. |
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https://1drv.ms/u/s!Ahz_oM1_DqLRkOsqfvA4akVzYeAOtg?e=4T1VND The Z-up, Y-forward result is important since all the prefabs will be oriented that way as well. The axis swap stuff works fine on plain objects, but it's just failing on the armatures, like the chicken model from earlier. Solving the armature rotation thing is the real trick. Well... probably until the next trick of sorting out the animation values. But that's a problem for later. |
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Added an optional argument |
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I think I'm going to put the animation work on hold and just finish up a 1.6 update with all the other backlog stuff that has been festering, such as the new Ivo format for SC and better material handling. I'm just spinning my wheels at this point. I've even run Blender from source and traced through the code to try to get a better understanding of what's going on, and... I think I just have a mental block. Sorry everyone. I'll get back on the animation stuff after a little break, but will start the 1.6 work this weekend. |
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No need to apologize, animation is its tricky beast. As someone who represents that SC community, we are very excited about the new IVO format being fixed, so we can have our landing gear. Especially with the new ships that have recently been released, and what appears to be noodles. As one of the few people doing animation with SC assets (via the Dymek Engine and non-animation files) I feel like setting aside the CGF-Converter animation support will not slow down the progress of the few who are experimenting with it (honestly I think I might be the only one). This especially being the case as StarFab currently does not access to the animation database . |
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Ok, I feel really dumb, but... I just installed 3.21 to get the latest files and can't find the |
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No problem, the .p4k (remember SC names their ,pak files with a "4", simply renaming the extension .pak usually works). Files location is usually ( \Program Files\Roberts Space Industries\StarCitizen\LIVE)
If that's not there, I'd try a file verification via the launcher and then make sure you can load arena commander or such. I had similar issue with one of the testing builds |
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Omg no wonder I couldn't find it. It was right in front of me. 🤦♂️ Thanks for the assist! |
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It's a pleasure |
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If you can, could you add an argument or go back to the old naming convention of "file name"+mtl+"material name" to be compatible with the StarFab Blender Plugins and 3DS Max workflows |
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I think I finally solved material issues.
It does require you to pass in the mtl file for the object in some cases. But at least I was able to delete a lot of code related to "if this weird ass edge case, then try to hack in this material". 😌 I think normals are all messed up. And always have been. |
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Yup, planning on getting the mtl naming updated here shortly. Just making sure that the glTF exports can handle the new way we're handling materials. Bonus is that instead of processing the material files for every node chunk, it just processes the mtl file once to create the materials. Soreepeong, where did you get the Rise of Lyric files? I don't have any good integration tests for those models, especially related to the pack file systems stuff that you added. I'm really nervous about breaking exports, and would love to add the game to my depot. I have a couple of models that I can test with, but since the converter is pretty dependent on maintaining the game data structure, it still makes me nervous to make changes that could affect those exports. |
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https://github.com/Soreepeong/SynergyTools I've made a full import/export tool for RoL; it can export a model to a file and import back seemingly without losing details or animations, and apparently works fine enough to even import from models exported from FFXIV. If you don't have the game files available with you, Internet Archive got the files; or I also can send you some exported files. |
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@Soreepeong I feel like I'm messing up the glTF stuff with this 1.6 update. I changed how materials work (instead of loading from each node chunk, the materials are created from the mtl file right away and added to the root @Baconator650, would "-" be ok as well? I'm pretty sure the dash isn't used in any mtl file or material name, so would be a good character to split on. |
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All the scripts and workflows are built around underscores "_" for the split and also for any spaces/blanks in the material name (we had an issue way back then with the spaces/blanks in the material names and the solution was to replace it with an underscore, as a result, the scripts built around this). Format used is: MtlName=.mtl filename Final Material Name=MtlName + " [underscore]mtl[underscore]" + Mat
Worst case scenario if we replace the underscore with a hyphen; I am sure the vmxeo could rewrite the blender scripts for to accommodated the change. And I can write a prehandling script for Max that would rename it to the proper format. |
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I'm doing that right now; hopefully it wouldn't take too long! |
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any of you guys triend the tool extracting aion models? |
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It would be amazing if you can check it, i'll try also even if i'm nop super expert, the version of the game is Aion that comes at gameforge website |
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I found the NCSoft version. Are there multiple Aion games? |
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the one you found is a newer version, that follow the first steps of the games, a bit like classic wow servers |
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Managed to extract the pak files from the game (the one from gameforge website) There was an error rendering D:\maghette\aionmount\KuillusRIDER03.cgf Unsupported FileS ignature NCAion at CgfConverter.CryEngineCore.Model.ReadFileHeader(BinaryReader b) let me know if you need the files for an investigation |
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I feel like I've looked at these Aion files in the past, and despite the file extension of |
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Well, the animation work (can't thank you enough @Soreepeong!) seems to chugging along, so now it's time to make some decisions. Here is my rough plans for what to do next, and I'd like to get the community's input.
Collada just doesn't seem like a great way forward anymore. Thanks to Soreepeong's implementation of the glTF renderer, I'm not sure Collada has much of a place anymore. Much like Waveform (.obj) files, it had its time. And since Blender's implementation of USD is still a work in progress, I'm thinking that glTF is probably the best way forward for at least the intermediate future. So here is what I'm thinking of doing for a 2.0 release:
glb. The other option isgltf, but I'm not sure of the differences on these yet. Does glTF/glB add the texture files into the file too?-isConsoleGame, so that the big endian processing takes place properly. I don't see a really good way to identify a console vs pc game based on the game files themselves. There is code that is in theory detects it, but I'm not really sure how (or if) that is working. Even for console games, the header info and chunk tables (and chunk headers) are in little endian format. It's just when the data is being read does this change. 😒Any other thoughts on what to do for a 2.0 release? It's going to take a bit of time, but hopefully I can get everything done by this summer.
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