The Harvest Moon Consortium

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Trimesh

Q:
I don't know how many other models have this, what it is, or what it does, but can someone fill me in on the 'Aurora Trimesh', what it is, what it does, and how to make it in Gmax? I noticed the light flail has an Aurora Trimesh on the stack in Gmax when I import the flail head. The head and all three of the chain links have their own Aurora Trimesh and I cannot figure out how to create one from scratch, when I should do it, and what parameters should be chosen.

A:
Aurora Trimesh is a NWmax modifier that holds NWN-Specific information like render/shadow options. You can apply it to any geometry object and the options will get exported into the mdl. These options dont have any effect in max/gmax. To learn more about what these options do, read Bioware`s Export Script Documentation that comes with the 3dsMax scripts you can download on this site.

'AuroraTrimesh' translates to 'AuraPoly' (and to 'MDL-Trimesh-Properties in MDL-Suite) there, and is missing only the DanglyMesh parameters (which have been implented as another modifier by Joco).

Hope that helps,
Vel

Q:
Is there a fundamental difference in the MDL Trimesh Properties as applied to meshes in a tile vs a placeable? The reason I ask is I had created a tile, complete with animations, and had one object that had an opacity of 21, which allowed me to see every mesh that was on the other side of them (with respect to the camera) as if it was translucent.

Because I wanted control over the animation via script, I was told I could not do that with a tile, so I decided to break those pieces off as a placeable. My problem is that now 'some' of the objects are not translucent, and some are, and I can't find a rhyme or reason for it? Everything, to the best of my knowledge, still has the same MDL Trimesh Properties associated with them.

Does perhaps parent-child relationships have something to do with it? That is the only thing that I can think that I did differently. I decided to relink many of the objects to objects that I felt were their logical parents, so if I grabbed a piece to move it around, the children moved with it. Could that be what is messing me up?

I've been playing around with linking meshes to other meshes, and it seems when I change those around and then go play the module, different meshes are rendered and not rendered behind that one mesh I was hoping to be 'totally' translucent. I haven't quite figured out the pattern yet.

In a placeable, is there a special dummy object (with a specific name, like "[tilename]a", which is what I had to do in my tileset) to link the animation to? This particular mesh is linked to another mesh that has animation and rotates. As that mesh rotates, I needed this other mesh to rotate, all that works fine, and I got it working beautiful in my tileset, but it all went cattywumpus now that I broke some of those pieces out and put them in a placeable.


A:
As far as I know the only thing that is going to control transparency on a mesh is either an alpha mask in the texture or the alpha setting on the mesh itself.

the dirt splotches that you see as placeables and tiles use the alpha mask in texture method.

the glass in the glass case by DLA uses alpha settings in the mesh. Anything that is not 1.0 is transparent. The lower the number the more transparent the item is.

If you want the geometry to be there but for the item itself to not render you can uncheck the render box in the properties also.

I used this on a recent face down book placeable to simulate the correct shadow seeing as I could not resolve the shadow issue with said book.

Book is set to render and not cast shadows. a single plane in the same shape as the book lying down is just above the book set to not render but to cast shadows. In game you only see the book and the shadow cast by the plane above it, so it looks like the book is casting the shadows.


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Q:
If you take a look at 'ttr01_k12_01', it's a tile that joins grass to 'docks', which are created when you place a 'road' crosser between a grass tile and a water tile.

On that tile, there is a plane (2 actually) that have the 'ttr01_road01' texture applied. The plane is 1cm Z higher than the grass. When you look at the tile in the toolset, and more so when you run in the game, the texture is faded and blends away into the grass nicely, presumably the alpha setting in the MDL Trimesh?

Anyways, I tried to create a plane on grass similar to that tile in a tile I'm building. Applied the texture, had to rotate it 90 degrees, stretched, poked, and finally collapsed it. Then I tried to add an MDL Trimesh, as I notied in the ttr01_k12_01 tile, and picked alpha. Saved it all off.

When I look at it in the game, it looks like a square. There's a 'slight' bit of transparency...but it's not anywhere near as nice as I see on the original tile. Any ideas about how to duplicate an object like that road plane?

Thanks