Questions, using Gmax. Update 7

[Daminon]

I'm new to modeling and I have two questions.

A) I have seen that blizzard models consists of very few meshes. I saw one very complex model from here that only had one mesh. How do you achieve that?

B) This is about animation. Take a look at the picture below.

This is a two-segmented tail of a creature. How to a make it go from the first one to become like the second in the picture? I heard that wc3 does not support vertex manipulation.

 

[alreadyused]

for the meshes i think you mean making one skin for the entire model?? cause it really doesnt matter how many meshes you have. Its best to keep breaks in the different meshes for ease of animation. I am not good at compiling alot of meshes into one skin so i wont get into that. As for your picture below how the one vertex moved to the side for a tail i guess. Create a bone..scale the bone down pretty small so it doesnt effect a large portion of the model. Bring up a skin modifier in gmax and choose envelope. then choose add bones. add the bone you just created to the envelope. Then look in the other viewports like top , left etc and scale the envelope to only affect the vertices that you want to move. Dont know what you call this method but it does work for warcraft using the latest dex script of course.

If the top question is about making all your meshes into one then simply convert one of the meshes to editible mesh then choose the attach command and click on each mesh that you want merged.

 

[Daminon]

About the vertex thing you mean like this:

and this...

and this

? Bone 1 covers the inner tail part entirely and the 4 inner vertices of the outer tail part. And bone 2 (which is chained to bone 1) covers ony outher singe vertex of the outher tail part. It works good for me.

 

[alreadyused]

yes very good. Thats all you have to do should export properly using latest dex version.

One more thing. say if you did have another mesh. Hypothetically say there was a sphere on top of that existing model there and you wanted it to be affected by movement of the lower portion. Then simply link the bone from the sphere mesh to the main parent bone in your little arm model there. This way your main piece of the model would have all pieces move with it when animated.

 

[Daminon]

I got another problem. Always nowmore when I need a mesh to have 2 bones and the bones lines and such cross each other the vertices becomes orange and yellow intead of dark red as they should be. Does that matter?

 

[alreadyused]

no that should be fine man i believe that has to do with the intensity the envelope has over each verticy. Like red is a more intense strength. By the way you should really look into getting 3ds max 7 or 8. There better than gmax and export more stuff with the new dex.

 

[Daminon]

I can't get 3ds since I use 56k. Another thing, can you somehow lock bones that aren't connected? Like this:

As you see this is the bones of a humanoid creature. I want bone the legs and the arms connetect to the middle body. How to do that?

 

[alreadyused]

take the base bone of each arm....the first arm bone created for each side and link them to the first body bone. Do the same for the legs. This will make it so that when you move your main body bone all the other pieces will be forced to follow.

 

[Daminon]

Ah, the link tool was pretty useful to say the least!

A new problem. I have succesfully exported two really simple test models and got them working. Now I'm trying to export my first real model with one single animation just to test if it works. But when I "print to listener" I got an error messege window with the titel "MAXScript Rollaout Handler Exception" saying "Unknown property: "x" in undefined".
Why do I get this?

 

[alreadyused]

make sure your models meshes are in editible mesh mode and not editible poly etc. Retry after that i havent used gmax in some time...what version of dex script do you have?

 

[Daminon]

I have DeX 0.185m.mcr. And I solved the problem. I was caused by some strange unused mesh that had no vertices or faces.

Another question. How do I make a corpse that is only displayed under the decay animation?

 

[alreadyused]

well with dex .185 i dont think visibility tags export....you need .186 or .60. and then again its a question of whether or not those scripts will work with gmax or not....i think they will. You need to right click in the perspective viewport to bring up the dope sheet editor. Then find your mesh that you want to be invisible during certain anims. it will be named in the list. Choose it then choose tracks/visibility tracks/add. Click in the spaces below to add visibity tags. Right click them and choose the exact numerical value for its animation time. Mine was 4000. i right clicked it chose a value of 1. 1 meens that its visible at that point in time. Then i chose to add more keys while still in the visibility tag part and clicked again to add another one. Then right clicked it and chose the end of its animation to be 5000 and a value of 0. 0 means the mesh is invisible at this time. Thats it. if you want to get some of these scripts or need some more help then get yahoo messenger and private message me and ill send you my account name.

 

[Daminon]

I will test these things later. Do you know where I can get any newer version of dex? I searched but found nothing.

 

[alreadyused]

the new versions of dex .186 and .60 are near impossible to find. I have both you can either let me know your email...private message me. Or you can get yahoo messenger and private message me and ill tell you my account name.

ok nevermind we now have attachments on wc3campaigns so i uploaded there... heres a link
http://www.wc3campaigns.net/showthread.php?p=747821#post747821

 

[Daminon]

I can't acces the wc3campaigns resources so it would be nice to have them by e-mail.

 

[Daminon]

About this visibility thing ehm, it looks quite different in Gmax. There even is not any dope sheet editor. I found a thing that look similar called Track View.

Any ideas of how to use it?

 

[alreadyused]

hmm its been ages since ive used gmax....i really dont remember and i removed that program from my hard drive..sorry.