If you have a decent understanding of max and a good workflow, no it isn't. If you do everything in max such as shaders all you need to do is place the values in the box's of open sauce and experiment. Collision, physics and rigging is always easier if you know the basics of modelling, and same with unwrapping.

Trust me, modelling takes a higher level of skill than porting. Porting assets are just more time consuming and everything you have to do with the ripped assets, you have to do with the custom assets combined with actually making them, in order to inject them into the engine.

Ever baked your own normal map through projection mapping? No, thought so. Ever baked an ambient occlusion map? Ever made a proper specular map? Ever produced a low poly mesh with your own seams?

This is coming from a guy who ported and animated lots of halo 3 models before even attempting making my own things.

But like waffles said. People are allowed to have their own fun and I won't be the fun police :p. Just trying to indoctrinate people.

Good software !

"render_model" shows nothing in reach maps, have you planned to do it ?

I thought models couldn't be extracted from Reach...

Reach only supports bitmaps.



It does, I remember a year or two ago I spent ages trying to match up the matIDs in max with the shader indexes from the meta editor, but now it's just automatic.

Yay.

This is what the models render like after you import them* (its a .avi video):
http://db.tt/s1Hphg0t
*The reflection in the visor was added manually.
I know it's not the best looking, but it'll do for an import.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 12, 2012 at 01:06 AM

oooh.

how did you put a halo cubemap in a reflect/refract mapping slot?

I just put a bitmap texture in the reflection slot with the cubemap as the texture, then applied a crop to cut out the black parts. It doesn't look as good as other ways but it was quick and I was just testing it.

I really appreciate what you are doing for the Halo ce community Gravemind.

so whenever i'm trying to batch extract a bunch of bitmaps from longshore i am getting extraction errors for every bitmap

that's genius.



It's corrupt.
Edited by ptowery on Oct 12, 2012 at 01:59 PM

this can be caused by a multitude of things. One cause could be that your mapfile for longshore is corrupt, which entails a redownload

another could be that your mainmenu.map or shared.map isnt in the same place, or are corrupt as well. Check your map directories if this is the case

can you add the ability to export any tag as the tag file (*.bitmap, *.model, *.model_animation) ?
I think it's the meta but I'm not sure.
Edited by ptowery on Oct 12, 2012 at 11:31 PM

R93_Sniper summed it up pretty well. Most likely there's some corruption somewhere, or possibly a file access issue. The next update will actually put the error message after it says "ERROR", if that helps.


No.

I got the EMFs to store and import UV tiling data, so now it can import detail bumps and certain models won't look weird. Pic related.


Edit: Got CC maps to import. Pic related.

Edited by Gravemind on Feb 13, 2013 at 07:47 AM

Woah, this certainly got an upgrade since the last time I had a look at it. Keep it up man!

I swear this wasn't there before, it just showed up today out of nowhere.

Edited by Gravemind on Feb 13, 2013 at 07:48 AM

No, its the masterchief_illum bitmap. His creepy Halo3Beta face is in the centre.

Thank you !

It was there before.

LOL,Marcus.
As you probably know,that face is Marcus' face (from Bungie)

When will this update come out?

Is it possible I can get the pelican bitmaps from Halo Reach with Adjutant?

It's out.


I'd say so, but if you want bitmaps from Reach Retail you have to search for them because the tags aren't named.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 14, 2012 at 03:21 AM

ILikeSafeStrings

That reminded me of something. I think I know what you mean, thanks.

Erm... What does B/D/S mean?

Wait.....kornman00 was working on a Halo Wars Extractor? Wow...that's...new. Never knew anyone was even working on such a project. Would have been cool to see such a thing released to the public. Anyways, keep up the awesome work Gravemind! You work and updates to Adjutant are awesome as always.

I was never working on one :(. I evaluated the idea, but the time investment just wasn't there. I know of someone who is trying to work on figuring out models (and/or animations?) but I don't keep in regular contact with them.

And Shadow would be a "better" form of help as he continues to mess with the later generations of the engine. I only do enough to add basic game support in BlamLib.NET (albeit, part of that support does include documenting the vertex formats and string_ids)

How are detail maps set up in max?

It means Base/Standard/Default. In the model extractor and viewer, it selects only those permutations. You can change what permutations this includes in the settings.


If anyone knows a simple and good looking way to do this for detail diffuse maps let me know and I can add it to the EMF import.

Also, lots of thanks to Kornman for decryption help. Reach Retail now has real tag names.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 15, 2012 at 09:15 AM

How do you get the EMF importer to work? I tried using it with max 8 long ago, but still doesn't work to this day. I'm guessing because it can't open MSE files.
Edited by Ki11erFTW on Oct 15, 2012 at 01:50 PM

Ah, okay that explains it. Thank you.

this any use?

http://filebeam.com/d84786e704a2cee87f8e55f189ec917f

it's 3ds max EMF importer works for max 8 9 2009.7z
Edited by ally on Oct 15, 2012 at 07:34 PM

nah forget that it doesn't work in max 8, just tried.
Edited by ally on Oct 15, 2012 at 07:38 PM

Yeah I tried before you're edit. Oh well. I've been using a few models using OBJ. Works good enough.