Ty OM, Ya i was thinking it had somethignn to do with the shadow because clicking selassigned showed me that my mesh was completly assigned... so i guess the shadow is where the problem is lol, but never the less i now have it showing perfectly in game so it was absolutly that thanks again ! least this is here for anyone who may have the same kinda problem i did with my mesh going ugly upon moving in milkshape.. ^.^ Thanks again x

Can you tell me what exactly do you mean by the above? I've had similar issues with the shading going wrong and I am curious.

Well i'm not 100% sure weather its a milkshape problem or just plain old .obj import problem.. but its something which for me i check all the time before i apply my new mesh to any mesh file.
Open up milkshape give it a move about see if the faces deform at all if they dont then your fine, if they do (randomly happened to me) then just go to the following:

(select your object from groups tab first)
Vertex > Weld together

and this will solve that problem

So just weld the whole object together and that gets rid of the silly shading? I'll have to try this. Thanks!

I think this trick gets rid of joint assignments...at least it did for me...so you can't use it on something that has joint assignments for animation that you would like to keep in place unfortunately.

I have a pesky crease on a mattress that I would like to get rid of but there is no way I want to try reassigning 110 joints for the MLOD and then that many more for the MODL.

OM

mmm yes there is that, but i think this is more for if you have an imported .obj into milkshape to replace an old MODL mesh, sometimes you get this and unweld or weldtogether is the only solution... I've had to do this on a recent mesh and it still had bone assignments...

Since you said it worked for you I tried it again and wala...the joints stayed in place...you are right about that. I don't know what happened the first time I tried it. Strangely though, this trick smoothed the crease out of the mattress the first time ( although it borked my blanket) but it didn't with the second test.

OM

Welding makes one joint out of two. Parts that are separate become one continuous mesh with welding. The appearance differences are because edges are smoothed differently than surfaces. Before welding, because the mesh had separate parts there were two edges, after welding those edges were gone and there was just a surface.

However, my experience is that .obj imports are not problematic for object meshing, other than having to manually redo bone assignments (because .obj carries no bone information in it). I suspect that the problem with the mesh was either already in it, or happened during editing.

Snapping moves vertices to the same location, but does not join them. On body meshes, use snapping on any seams... you can't have welded seams on body meshes. You can't really have welded seams on object meshes either, but the exporter can change any improperly welded vertices to snapped ones.

Another way and probs a much more safer way is to go to tool > Clean this also fixes the mesh its something that works for me perfectly :-)

I always use the Clean tool on my meshes.
Anyway, neither that, nor the welding did anything at all to correct the shading for me.


Sometimes objects behave strangely in milkshape. I have been trying to solve my issues with normals for a very long time now. I have 2 kinds of "align normals" tools and I make smoothing groups, but it's all in vain, the stupid dark shading just doesn't go away. I think it is caused by where there should be 2 (or 3) normals at a point, there is only 1. And I can't fix that with anything in MS.

Even objects that looked okay before, when I import one into milkshape it will go all dark now and cannot be repaired any more. Which is a PITA right now when I have to fix my bluelotting plants to work with the expansion.

Wes, what do the importer/exporter do with the normals? What can I do to avoid them being collapsed?

PS. And no, AutoSmooth is NOT checked.

Here is an illustration.

I think the exporter is not the problem... it copies the data provided by MilkShape, although that is then required to be compressed into small integers. There was a bug, many versions ago, where normals that were completely vertical or horizontal would get 'flipped' (a sign inversion), but I fixed that long ago.

I look at your picture and I see what I think is a two-sided mesh. However, I do not see two sets of normals, except in one place (left side, 2/3 way up) I see a normal of one triangle pointed in one direction and another from the same triangle pointed in the opposite direction. This and not being invisible or looking like it is the backside is what makes me think there are two sets of triangles here, and that they are positioned exactly collinear.

Two triangles back-to-back exactly sometimes do not render properly... people have had that problem making the insides of jars and hair layers and all sorts of items. Sometimes the top and bottom layers get rendered backwards or something.

What fixes that is moving one copy very slightly, just enough to be sure it will never get rounded to be on the wrong side of the reverse copy. When you duplicate the first mesh part, and reverse the faces, while it is selected you can choose move and you can specify an amount for each direction. You have to know which way is which, +X is right, +Y is up, +Z is toward you, use one or more to move in the direction that will enhance the front/back positioning. The amount to add should be about 0.00003, which is right at the limit of precision for the compressed versions that are actually passed to the game.

Do that on one leaf (I am guessing this is a plant) and view the normals in the selection editor, and you should then see clear normals in both directions. That should then remove the dark patches you are seeing.

Thanks very much for the reply!

Yes that's exactly what bothered me. Thank you for explaining what causes the problem. The two triangles are sometimes so close together that I cannot even select one of them, only both. (This is an EA mesh. The leaves on my own plant meshes worked okay.) I guess this also explains the inconsistency I experienced. I opened and closed the mesh a few times without doing anything to it and each time it looked different, lol.

Okay now that is solved, next question
I experience lack of normals on other kinds of objects too. For example take a rectangular shaped something, at its edges there should be 2 normals per vertex at right angles to each other, right? Sometimes that's the case, but other times, only one normal in the middle, which makes the object darker, and even if the two sides are in separate smoothing groups, and I don't know what I'm doing wrong?

I've been wrestling with normals for a long time now and each time I think I figured out how to win, they find a new way to misbehave. So I may have more questions in the future, sorry!

There is usually one normal per vertex. To make more than one normal, you must either place faces in different smoothing groups, or make separate co-located vertices. With either solution, when exported to the game there will be one vertex per normal, the exporter will duplicated the necessary vertices.

The game format has one vertex, one normal and one UV point per triangle corner, so in order to have sharp corners you have to have the adjacent triangle each have their own normals, so the must also have separate vertices. The construction with smoothing groups (MilkShape, Maya and others allow this) gives a method to have multiple normals per vertex, but this still has to be converted on export to fit into the game model.

This is neither good nor bad either way, one way requires fewer vertices but more indexes, the other requires fewer indices and more duplicate vertices. Depending on the particular model, one may be a slightly smaller file than the other, but the percentage size difference for either is small.

So here is a suggestion for deciding what to do. Parts where you want a smooth, rounded shape, such as on the surface of a sphere or the curved face of your plant frond, weld the vertices for the faces, so when the object is smoothed the single normal will be set to the average of the normal for the two faces. For sharp edges, such as the edge of a table, join the surfaces by snapping the vertices together to the same location, but do not weld them. Then your two normals will continue to point in different directions, making a defined shading transition at the edge.

While smoothing groups will manage this also, with fewer vertices, at the end of the process the exporter will tell you it added some vertices anyway, and the ones it added were all the places you saved vertices by using smoothing groups.

It's like life... you can't win, you can't draw, and no one survives.

*a lightbulb lights up in LC's head*
Ahha so it's all about welding/unwelding those edges, why didn't I think of that!
Now I get it.
Thank you again for taking the time to explain. It's good to have someone around who knows what they're doing!
I hope those pesky shadows won't trip me up again now

But this is exactly what i said above to OM ... maybe you misread.. Glad you have sorted out your problem though anyway :-)x

Hum not exactly, you said I should weld together the whole object to get rid of the shading. But the solution is the opposite, I shouldn't weld those edges together that I want to look sharp with no shading.

here hun is where i said about unweld or weldtogether i should ahve been more exact as to how the both function but i dont use milkshape to mesh my objects... so i'm picking up a few things and sharing where i can :-P

Seems about time for a group hug here don'cha think?.

OM

No, we are not arguing here, are we?
I just didn't quite get what Melanise said, only when Wes explained it more detailed. I guess I'm a bit slow, sorry about that... (Is this the proper place to use "english is not my native language" as an excuse? haha)
Anyway thanks for the help all of you, this problem was making me nuts so I'm so relieved.

I didn't think so...I just thought it would be nice ...besides, I still owed you a hug.

Sorry for the double post here. But I'm still having this problem with a crease in my mattress. Is this a problem with the normals of this object? I've been trying to fix it but am having no luck.



I import the mattress from the decompiled object and this is how it appears. I've seen other mattresses without this crease so I know it's possible to do...I'm just having a tough time figuring it out.

Thanks for any help.

Did you move it at all ? pop it up for download and i'll have a fiddle with it :-)

Thanks tons Mel. The thing is, I didn't move it at all...this is just the EA mattress brought into MS as-is. But I've cloned several of the EA beds now and the mattress looks like this no matter what.

It's severely annoying because that crease actually shows up in the game when I use the mattress on my bed frames. I tried your trick of welding on it and that actually does smooth the crease on the mattress but it makes the blanket portion of the object get very weird so I can't go with just that to fix the crease. I've thought of pulling the thing apart to fix it but that's a no-go because then I'd have to deal with the joints and that would be even more painful than the problem with the crease.

Anyway, this mattress is just the EA contemporary double bed mattress but I made a package of it to save you the trouble. If there's a way of using that weld trick without borking the blanket at the same time that would be ideal.

http://jaue.com/om/OM_Bed_EAContClone.rar

Ok awesome i'll have a fiddle with it and get back to you soon :-)