>>10466918anyway, continuing on, we could FINALLY get a proper model with 2.0.4 and in blender without having to export an obj from 3ds max. woo.
Now to actually work with this jank AF model.
With 2.0.4, instead of 8 different models stacked on top of each other, it is now reduced to 2 models. One of those two models are the one we want to keep. The other is just weird trash that you can discard. Luckily, the meshes happen to be in order, so all the correct meshes tend to be within where the first correct one starts and the last one ends. So as an example if the first correct part is mesh_76_0 and the last correct mesh is mesh_120_54, then everything in between will be correct and everything else can be discarded.
How can you tell whhich one is correct? Well it'll have the UV maps. The othe ones will only have one dot in the corner to represent the UV map so those go in the delete pile. and are unnecessary.
So initiall,y tw bro and I were using blender 2.93 since its just so nice and clean and stff, and we thought, hey, we could always export it as an OBJ once we get the model textured and to a point where we could port it back to blender 2.79 to finish the process.
The thing with ninja ripper 2.0.4 is, it auto assigns a texture to a UV. and in the file itself, which you can open with a notepad, there are usually about 5~15 different dds files listed (the kind of file used to texture the models here) and it always selects the first one.
The first one is always wrong.
so you get theres odly colored models that all use the same texture....
So initially we just decided to go through the folder of items and go through the textures to find the right one. this is annoying since ninja ripper rips like, 300 different textures too. Eventually we learned the open the actual file strat in notepad and copy pasted each into file exporer to locate the right one, but it was an annoyance...
So, eventually, we decided to try texturing our first model. Dimesman. you know him. the egg himself. And we actually got him all textured and stuff.
Now another thing to learn about 2k model imports: they have no skeleton nor do they come with weights. The skeleton lets you pose a model. The weights kinda dictate how much the skeleton moves the model. So if I have an arm bone and most of the arm is painted red, or one in this case, then the arm will move one to one with the bone. Or at least thats how I understand it.
So that leaves doing it with vertex positioning... aka manually positioning the model by moving around the skin layer.
TWbro and I were like, fuck that.
We really should have gone with it in the first place, since we actually tried to bind a skeleton to our model manually to pose it, only to realize that autoweights completely and utterly fuck up and that moving the arm will also move like, the back of his head for some reason.
At this point, we had enough of 2K's BS and asked for help.
Our first cry for help was shot back with "This shit is too eldritch for me bro I'm tappin' out."
So we asked tomato for help.
And so the elder gods descended and actually made sense of the model.
So, tomato gave some insight. He was using 2.79 and as it turns out, despite the importer for 2.0.4 being designed for 2.8 and above, in 2.79, it actually LISTS the textures that are in the file in another window. like wtf. So that just made our job a lot easier.
So new knowledge in hand, we decided to start from scratch in 2.79... and so we take another step deeper into the abyss.
