Blender Vertex Mesh export Plugin [V1.2.5].

[luke11685]

Yes it's in 3d modelling software only not in the game.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/4h3vcxan4j5a0f7/jazz_jackrabbit_zoe_cottontail_custom_skin_loq_poly_aesthetics_late_90%2527s_stuff.blend/file
http://www.mediafire.com/file/cggmh40dfjkf7u5/zoe_d.3d/file

This is what happened when I was trying export this model file to _d.3d and _a.3d.
At least it's impressive that I didn't even have to edit every frame of Jazz Jackrabbit like I should,right? Double model layers in edit mode as you see.

[Skywolf]

That error is because the model has no actions. Just one timeline with keyframes. Exporting using Scene Timeline as source should fix this (might add that into the error message in a later version).

I honesly have no clue what you are doing exactly. There are multiple overlapping meshes so this isn't how it was imported. No idea what you did so can't really say where things went wrong.

The .3d file you uploaded is only the data file (_d.3d). I need the animation file (_a.3d) aswell to be able to import the model into blender.

[luke11685]

It was my first test of my first jj3d character mod. Also why I can't display articles of The Complete Unreal Ed Reference Guide.chm in Help.exe freely? Like it could be empty page(I know there are more pages I guess)
As for Zoe Cottontail 3d model it happened when I merged her hair with body.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/tewmo08e932z47k/zoe_a.3d/file

[Skywolf]

No sure you are even supposed to be able to open the reference guide that way. It's possible it's written in a different format than what UED expects. I'm pretty sure you can just open them outside editor though.

The _a.3d file you sent me is the same as the _d.3d file. So can't import that. Generally speaking the _a.3d file is several times larger than the _d.3d file. Provided the model has a bunch of animations (which I assume a player character has).

[luke11685]

Well I was trying to export it as _a.3d,but I didn't find such file. What's that tool doing anyway? https://eliotvu.com/portfolio/view/21/ue-explorer It seems it's not supporting Unreal Engine 4 games just like UT4XConverter(discontinued)and Unreal Model Viewer do.So uhm will Quick BMS(I heard about this tool for a first time of modding Sonic Generations-high poly environment) also help me packing model files?

[Skywolf]

I literaly have no idea what you are trying to do here. You say a tool for packaging model files for a Sonic game might help you packaging models for UE1 games? Sonic Generation doesn't use anything even similair to UE1. So why would you even think it would work?

And judging from the page you linked about UE-Explorer does it seem it just decompiles uscript. UE4 doesn't use uscript anymore (only C++ and Blueprints afaik) so makes sense it doesn't work with that. But why are you suddenly talking about UE4? I though this was about trying to replace the player character in JJ3D....

And it makes sense it doesn't export the animation file due to that error it gave. But I was under the assumption that something went wrong during import of the model from JJ3D so I assumed you would give me the original _d.3d and _a.3d files extracted from the game. Not exported from whatever mess you created in Blender.

[luke11685]

So what should I do export _a.3d correctly and properly? Well I'm talking too fast about multiple mods from other games because I'm too ambitious. I also have more plans for the future. Also because I'm freelancer. Anyway why this .chm file wasn't converter at least to .pdf file?

[Crimzan]

Hey Skywolf!

Super cool addon, makes the model importing process to Deus Ex much much easier!

Sorry if this is kinda offtopic, but I have a different question, that hasn't much to do with the .3d files, but... t3d files? Basically Unreal Prefabs; brushes that can be imported and exported. Kind of a feature request, if you will.

Sometimes I went ahead and modeled something in my 3D package, and used 3D Object Converter to convert said model into a t3d file that I can import into Deus Ex.
But it doesn't work THAT well because it kinda removes some faces from it which also causes a few annoying artifacts upon map rebuild (like invisible barriers / walls).

But other than that it allowed me to model some simple shapes very very quickly, which would have given me a bit of a hard time if I did this only with the brush builder in-engine.
And I was wondering, would it be hard to create a Blender t3d exporter / importer? Or do you know of one? One that might even save UV coordinates, that once imported into Deus Ex / Unreal, with the texture applied it could look like the little simple object I made in 3D in my package?

Again, sorry for going offtopic like this but I'd really like to know if you have thought about if it is possible to use this format for mapping or creating prefabs without having to use the Brush Builder

[Krull0r]

Hey hello and welcome

If you have Unreal and 227I you can import your mesh as obj into Unreal. After importing just add the mesh to the level and covert it to brush then you can save the brush as .t3d

This method will also store your UV information from Blender

[Crimzan]

Hello and thank you for the welcome!

Sounds like there's really a super quick and easy solution available for getting models as brushes!
However, I Map in Deus Ex, not in Unreal, and when I try to import an object in UEd1 I do not get .obj as a format choice

Am I missing something? Is this "227I" that you mentioned a specific patch? Does it work / exist for Deus Ex as well?

[Krull0r]

Oh this Website here is mainly about the Unreal 227 Patch. It’s the community patch for Unreal we are working on.

You can download this Unreal patch here in the download section.

After you installed the patch and you start the editor the editor will give you a few more options for example you can import static meshes as .obj directly in the mesh browser.

You can also convert brushes to static meshes and export it over the mesh browser to .obj

[luke11685]

It seems in UnrealEdReference pdf file ebook usually have old websites with error codes 404(outdated links) and the rest of them are updated websites that have nothing to do with Unreal Engine/Editor 1,but Unreal Editor/Engine 4 instead. Btw thank you for helping me guys. So what I do now? It's just complicating things to learn some basics first for instance map building in ue1.

[Skywolf]

If you want to import BSP Brushes you basically have two options.:

1. Use Unreal 227, export your mesh to .obj, import your mesh as Static Mesh and convert it to brush. You can then export it to .t3d and move it over to Deus Ex.

2. Export to .DXF (you have to enable this plugin in Blender's Preferences) which UnrealED can import. Downside of this workflow is that you lose your UV Mapping.

And yes, a lot of Unreal I's resources are outdated like that. That said, It's odd that the Tutorials page the link on the left side bar brings you to has download links that go back to Oldunreal.com with an access denied error (403 Invalid Download Referer). This seems like an oversight to me.

[luke11685]

I was so determined to try to learn something could Tim Sweeney CEO of Epic Games close these websites. Because limited tutorial resources makes me feel frustrated.

[MrRobotBear]

I'm having trouble sometimes importing my mesh after export. Seems like the file is locked by Blender so nothing can open it for reading, exiting Blender resolves it. Is it possible that the exporter isn't properly closing/releasing the file after export?

[luke11685]

Tell me everything about keyframes(animation 3d model poses) and target morphing. It seems all downloadable files in tutorial section are locked and highly secured I mean prohibitly protected.

[Skywolf]

The exporter not releasing the files is pretty much impossible without Blender getting stuck itself. But ff something like this happens again you can check Blender's System Console (Toggleable Under Window in the menu bar at the top of the screen) and see if it printed Created Successfully. for each of the files you told it to export.

There isn't much to say about Keyframes and Target Morphig Keyframes are just transformations for objects (bones, meshes .etc) to interpolate between. Target Morphing is the same only for vertices instead.

If you want to know about Blender's animation system then I recommend looking up tutorials and the official documentation.

[luke11685]

I can't do it.

But I would love to.
Do you know why I can't download files in old Unreal forums tutorial section label?

Was such files related to Unreal Engine/Editor 1 deleted or what?

[Skywolf]

Download them from here: https://www.oldunreal.com/editing.html. Smirftsch seems to have screwed up. He uses some direct link protection to avoid people linking to oldunreal from their own site without giving credit. Which is fair enough but this also seems to block links from the oldunreal wiki .

[luke11685]

Thanks dude.

[MrRobotBear]

Alright, thanks for the tip, a bit annoying that Blender won't let you do that though.

Edit: I was talking about importing the mesh into Deus Ex after export from Blender, and not importing it into blender again, but you probably understood what I meant.

A few other things I noticed (since I'm fixing up a few Deus Ex meshes). Hopefully you aren't too discouraged by this lengthy list.

When importing static meshes with animations:

• I get an index out of range when I try to import a static mesh, with only the "Still" animation frame. Maybe that's cause "From Frame" is set to 1 (not possible to set to 0)? Something similar happens if I set "From Frame" to a number the Mesh doesn't have. Would it be possible to add some null check, or if "From Frame" is larger than the number of Frames in the _a.3d then start at the first frame? It makes little sense to start at the last frame since we want animations.
• I also get a Shape key with Frame0 that prevents me from applying certain modifiers (easy to delete though), might be a bit of a hack, but perhaps check if there is only one frame, then don't make a shape key at all? Sometimes I don't know if it's a mesh with animations or not, so I just want to import with animations to make sure. If this is possible then we could just keep the Animation box ticked all the time, unless we know we don't want animations.

Importing in general:

• Would it be possible to have Import format auto-sensing? Like it could check if it conforms to the ION Storm format, and if so use that? I only work on Deus Ex, and it's a bit of a pain to always change the format when importing meshes. Sometimes I forget and have to redo it. It doesn't seem possible to save this an default. While it won't resolve having to select the correct format when exporting, at least with this I don't have to do it when importing.
• Sometimes when importing and using "Make Materials" (which I always use), the materials are not properly named in sequence (all materials start with 000). I haven't been able to pinpoint what triggers it, certain meshes does this when imported while others are fine. If you want to try it, import this with Animations in the ION Storm format: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5sfs81rorhap5 ... 1.zip?dl=1
  Edit: This happens when there is only one material, but different polys have different polyflags. However in the resulting .uc file I still get texture imports and settexture for all of the materials and not just one per number.
• Also when using "Make Materials" I noticed that there is an extra underscore in the material name on import like 001_TRANSLUCENT__UNLIT_ I'm not sure if this affects the polyflags set and if it works with both one underscore and two, but should probably be fixed. Also not sure if the underscore at the end is needed. In your first post you specify the modifiers with a leading underscore but then in the examples you also have a underscore at the end.

When exporting:

• When exporting using Timeline I don't need to select the mesh when in Object mode, regardless of your instructions to select the mesh. In my case I started with an empty scene, imported a mesh and made my edit to it directly. I have nothing else like armatures, lights or cameras in the scene. However if I have it unselected and in Edit mode I get an index out of range. I'm not sure if this is fixable, but if it's possible to make it behave the same as in object mode that would be nice.
• If LODFRAME=0, which is the default, could you make it not add that to the .uc file? It doesn't do anything since it's default in the engine too.
• When I do UV in Blender need to set the material to use the texture belonging to the mesh. I set the Material to use Nodes, then Surface to Diffuse BSDF and then Color to Image texture and I open the texture (not sure if I can use Image textures in another way). Side note: I only work with .bmp for Deus Ex, unless I really need .pcx due to a bug in the TextureFactory when importing/exporting really small .bmp images. This works fine. But then in the .uc file after export it doesn't strip the .bmp from the Texture name so I end up with

  Code: Select all

  #exec TEXTURE IMPORT NAME=LightSwitchTex1.bmp FILE=Textures\LightSwitchTex1.bmp.PCX

  Could you perhaps make it recognize both .bmp and .pcx and use the correct extension in FILE and strip the extension in NAME?
• If the material is not set to Masked, don't set FLAGS=2 in the .uc file. You could also set the FLAGS to the polyflags for the material, like if it's NoSmooth then FLAGS=2048 and if both masked and NoSmooth then it's 2050. However that's a matter of taste, since maybe you don't want to import the texture with the flags, just cause the material uses it.

That's all I have for now I think. I must say I'm really glad you made this plugin, since without it it would be so much harder to get models into the game in the proper way. These are just minor issues I encountered that might improve workflow, but on the whole it's very solid, and all of these can be worked around.

[luke11685]

How to extract character models by using only Unreal Editor 1 classes browser?

[MrRobotBear]

I've been messing around a bit with animated meshes now and found some more things.

• It took a while for me to notice, but in order to export all the frames you must set the current frame to 0, otherwise it will start at the frame you are at and repeat it. Like I had a mesh with two frames. If I stand on frame 1 instead of 0 it will export frame 1 twice to fill both frames. Presumably you'd like to export all the frames regardless of the current frame in the timeline. Could you change the exporter to start at frame 0?
• Something that makes this even more confusing is that if you stand on frame 0 and then export, the exporter will run trough all frames and end up on the last frame. If you don't catch that and export again it would appear as if the animation suddenly broke with no changes at all. Would it perhaps be possible to save aside the current frame you are on and after export restore to that frame? Would be a nice combo with the previous point as well, or just the notion that the mesh is invariant when run through the exporter.
• As I know, some modifiers can't be used with shape keys (can any?). I added a Edge Split modifier just to see how it would look, but you can't actually press apply since Blender won't allow you. Then I forgot that it was added to the stack but not applied, and I went about my business and did other stuff and eventually exported the mesh. Frame 0 looks good, then all hell breaks loose. Eventually I realized it was the modifier that was left there. Could the exporter warn about that, or would you have to hardcode every illegal modifier if shape keys are present?

That's all for now.

[luke11685]

Are you trying to make character animations?

[MrRobotBear]

No I'm not, I'm attempting to clean up some Deus Ex items/deco that has some "issues". ION Storm decided to save a tiny amount of memory by getting rid of the two polygons of the back/bottom of a lot of things, that's fine unless you then put that thing on a glass table or against a glass window.

So I'm adding that back, and usually split the edges to get better shading. Some meshes are animated like switches.

I just noticed another thing that's slightly odd, in this one mesh on import the materials are not in number order:
File here for import: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7prg6br1hxzk ... l.zip?dl=1