Vercingetorix

[Sundjata Keita]

Hope this grabs your attention Vercingetorix. I was going to ask the question how do you find which verts share texture verts? but I did a search on the forums to see if anyone had asked it before and there came a post by Duke John about breaking verts on the model rarther than in the uv map. You replied to him and you said

Yep this is a pain. You see in max the texture vertices and the mesh vertices are not related at all! And so you may have more or less texture vertices then mesh vertices, f you have more then it causes problems. There are a few things you can do.

One is in the editible mesh panel select all the faces below the waist and detach them, then attach this new object that you just detached. This will seperate the vertices at the waist which is not the same as breaking them. Breaking vertices will result in many vertices and may cause hard edges when smoothing. Do the detach/attatch where all the other uv's are broken, that is where the the mesh is continous but the uv's are not, for example where the waist and chest meet. They are continous but seperate "chunks" in the uv editor; the border verts have multiple texture verts which is what causes problems.

Two is to break all the verts that share texture verts. Not as elequent but works. I wrote a script for this purpose that finds all vertices have texture vertices shared and breaks them. The result is many more vertices then you need and possible smoothing problems, it works but not as reccomended as option 1. I'm not at my home pc right now but when I am in about 5 hours I can upload it for you if you want.

Three is to break all the verts. Bad idea :p

The bit I'm focussing on is you writing a script to do this. Did you ever upload it? If so where can I get it? If not please could you. Does anyone know where I can get this?

Thanks for any help in advance ,
Sundjata Keita

[Vercingetorix]

I may still have that script but the results were imperfect. The reason being that it would simply break any verticies that had shared texture vertices which resulted in extra vertices and inflated the model vertice count. If you really want it I'll dig it up but for better results simply seperate the faces that give you problems.

[Sundjata Keita]

Ok well can you at least tell me how to find which ones are causing the problem.

Thanks

[hoggy]

The way I use is: in element mode select and drag each of the elements in turn. If they don't move away from the body cleanly there's your bad vertex. Probably not the best way but you normally have an idea where the stray verts might be and there aren't that many elements.

[GodsPetMonkey]

I'm in a sharing mood, so I tell you how I make sure of these things!

I find the best way is to always make sure your elements never become attached, but this isn't always possible.

I identify the areas that should be detached (any part of the body that isn't saemlessly connected to its neighbours in the texture should be detatched to its own element!) then using the poly or face tool, I select the part of the body that should be detatched (limbs and head are pretty safe bets) makeing sure I have all faces/polys that make up that element, and no more, then on the right hand pane, hit detach (like if you wanted to detach a head to import into another model) and make sure the 'detatch to element' check box is selected. Hit ok, and its done! (I'm using 3dsMax 7, so this may not be possible in earlier versions, sorry).

Another good tip is you don't have to fire up RTW to see if you got and texture warping! Just reset your 3ds session (or better still, fire up new session) and import the model you just exported. Generally you can see if there are any problems or not, but always take another look in RTW! But hey, you are going to test the finished model atleast once, so thats no issue.

[Sundjata Keita]

Thanks you two. The problems I was having were on my own new models so the whole thing was warped so it was not as easy to tell which vertexes were causing the problem. Luckily this meant I could just break all vertexes but I just wanted to know for future reference so thanks again