I am trying to learn how to port a biped to Halo CE.
(I want to port,because it would be the next best thing to do besides making boxes).

Gravemind has set everything up already in the EMF file.
Now,I just need some pointers for exporting it.

Rename bones corresponding to halo ce ones, remove extra finger bones, weld verts and fix smoothing groups, apply materials in 3ds max, export and compile.

Basic brief overview.

I expected you to post in this thread.

Thanks. Should I adjust the fingers before I destroy the bones?

EDIT:Nodes=Bones,right? Are the little spheres markers?

Edited by Dumb AI on Jan 29, 2013 at 07:39 PM

Ah, before going on, nodes are the green little spheres and bones are, well, long pieces of simple greyish-silver geometry that act as bones. Yeah, mesh is skinned/rigged to nodes and bones, except that bones can only rotate based upon their parent node whereas nodes can move around despite having the possibility of being linked to a parent node.

And yes, you should adjust the fingers before destroying the bones (Don't delete the bones directly, you must move the bones and then skin the entire hand mesh including fingers to the wriste). Afterwards, import the cyborg from halo ce and use the markers, place them at proper positions and link them to the correct parent node before exporting to halo ce again. I believe hand markers from the cyborg are what you want to be positioned properly. From valhalla, I probably mis-rotated the markers and caused the hands to look messed up :/

Are the bones names same as the marker names?

Can you explain how I'm supposed to "skin the entire hand mesh including fingers to the wrist"?

well depending on the biped you can just save envelopes in the skin modifier and collapse it, then you import the nodes from a similar model that's already in-game and create a new skin modifier. add the frame nodes into the skin, then line up the nodes accordingly. after that click load envelopes and select the .env file you saved previously. then line up the names of the bones to the names of the nodes in the window and click OK, you now should have an almost perfectly rigged biped ready to go ingame

Depending on the biped, if it is the masterchief, you don't even need to save envelopes and reimport. Just rename bones on the masterchief (assuming that's what you're porting) to the halo ce equivalents, and do what I said before in my previous posts.

Can you explain how I'm supposed to "skin the entire hand mesh including fingers to the wrist"?

Click on masterchief model, go to skin modifier, select the wrist bone in the list of all teh bones, click edit envelopes, select the finger vertexes, set weight to 1.0. Repeat on other hand

Look,if you are going to explain things,you may as well go into deeper detail.

Clicking "edit envelopes" and "select vertices" does nothing.
The weight tool claims that no vertices have been selected.
Edited by Dumb AI on Jan 30, 2013 at 12:37 AM

You're supposed to drag your mouse over the vertices...

Can't you just import a GBXmodel, look at how it looks and play with it randomly then take a basic tutorial about rigging and port it ?
And creating/using halo shaders is really simple and exactly like a BSP.

Shaders are not what I am trying to make here.

The tutorials don't seem to be what I'm looking for,if you know what I mean.
They don't really cover "messing around with fingers and hands".

Assuming that my definition of rigging is correct,that is not necessary for this particular model (already rigged).



Edited by Dumb AI on Jan 30, 2013 at 10:49 AM

It's always better to re-rig from scratch a model... and H3 bipeds are very easy to rig

Not always better to re-rig a model when it's already rigged. Sure, if you rerig then you will learn how to rig models by yourself, but it saves the time when it's already using bungie's rig that can already be directly ported by just renaming bones.