3rd Party Models/Media Chat / Gun Making Questions (please help)

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Bugsy
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2016 00:56 Edited at: 10th Nov 2016 23:25
I've been spending a whole lot of time getting guns from FPS banana and animating them so I can have some more things to visually differentiate my games from the host of other games that will be using BSP and EAI's guns. I was kind of hoping the weapon import procedure in gameguru would have been improved from FPSC but perhaps I am only doing it the old way out of ignorance.





I dont even think my problem is coming from gameguru. 3DS max cannot seem to export this gun, period, and I don't understand why. The gun movement is fine, but the hands always come out un-UVMAPPED and spidery.



does anyone with experience in this know why this is happening to me?



UPDATE::::::
this gun:

is invisible for some reason. I do not know why


please help???
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Errant AI
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 00:05
Which shader are you using and are your gun and hands on the same map?

With the arm mesh, make sure you've reset x-form before skinning it. Failure to do so can cause some weird stuff like that. You may need to also cap the bone weight limit (I limit to 3 bones per vertex). Can't remember if there's an option for it or not but if you can export the bones as visible geometry and then use the _basic weapon shader you can see better if the issue is with the rig or the mesh but reskinning is probably in order.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 00:29
JAKE, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR REPLY!!!

I was worried I was gonna hear nothing about this. I've decided to give up on counterstrike hands and their ridiculous numerous problems, and go onto using your hands (you gave me max versions of them a while ago)

SO: I used the m9 version that I re-animated for FPSC's Kshatriya and re-exported it. The hands are no longer spiders, but this is the problem I am encountering now. I am using the weapon-basic shader.



the animation and hands dont seem to mess up, but for some reason the gun and slide are sitting in an odd position.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 00:40
HYPOTHESIS:
the problem is KW-xporter versus my old 3ds max which was 2012 so I used panda's .x exporter

reason for this:
I used the .x from kshatriya's folder in my FPSC directory (the older, MUCH larger [166kb vs 1.4mb]

here's that one. gun looks fine.



THIS IS STILL AN ISSUE: I cannot figure out how to go from 3ds max to Gameguru with new guns, but I have made some progress here
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Errant AI
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 01:11
GG is really sensitive about xforms and rig scales/transformations. I basically had to unlink everything and reset pivots, etc coming from x9 to GG. Some rigs were fine and others ended up being offset like that. I never really got to the bottom of it because I am using a new rig now which streamlines things a bit. I'm using still using panda since I haven't upgraded max so I can't really say anything about KW settings or output. On a side note, early on, I was attempting some edits on the stock weapon animations but they were using biped and for whatever reason, I could never get them to export WYSIWYG. The trans/rot was always off in-engine. Never got to the bottom of that either but thought you could use the heads up.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 02:32 Edited at: 27th Sep 2016 03:59
damn, so how would you suggest I go about it? re rig your hands the exact same way?
if i catch you online can i chat you up troubleshooting it?
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 04:02 Edited at: 27th Sep 2016 04:09
Just be super judicious about your rigging so that you can rule out problems.

LIke- if the hands are fine but the gun is being wonky then don't be afraid to completely detach the weapon and unlink everything then reset xforms and pivots, animation, etc. and rebuild those components. You may find that certain bits will do weird stuff like rotate themselves 180-degrees when you reset pivots.

These sort of errors were somehow able to go uncorrected on X9 but when it came time to properly skin the hard surface meshes for GG, I was getting a lot of these weird floaty offsets.... when going through some of these rigs trying to troubleshoot various issues, some would basically fly apart like a box of springs once I started resetting pivots and whatnot.

However you decide to rig is of course up to you. If you do an all new rig or use biped or bones or whatever be prepared to do a lot of incremental screwing around so that you can isolate problems before they compound.

edit: Yeah feel free though I've not been logging into messengers lately because I get flooded. Feel free to use my email as well since I'm not on forums regularly and I can't figure out how to get it to notification email me when I get PMs. Forum discussions can be slow going but at least it puts the info out there in the public sphere for others who might benefit.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 05:03
Okay. what I'm going to do is try and animate/export another gun, now on your hands. I'll make sure I import the model and hit "reset X-form" on it before i start.

BEFORE THAT, I'm going to try just exporting the hands as a control-group for this experiment.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 07:33
okay so another quick question, and an update:
the question is asking why when I use the same simplezoom gunspec commands from my FPSC gunspec, the ironsights do not line up in gameguru. can you give me an explaination of what the simplezoom and old airmod commands do?

update: a hands-only gun worked fine from kwX xport with your 3ds max rig
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 10:00 Edited at: 27th Sep 2016 10:27
The camera parameters are a little different in GG. In X9, if you had it centered with the aiming point at 0,0 you were golden but in GG it will generally be closer to the camera and off to the side a hair. I calibrate my animations and settings for Weapon FOV=70, Horizontal FOV=110 in GG options.

You also need to be aware of a hardcoded head bobble type effect. This feature is so that there is a little default movement to the weapon when moving. With this feature, you can have literally zero animation for move anims and the gun will bubble a small amount when moving. This feature is also active in aimed mode but last I checked there is a bug where it doesn't return to zero when stationary if moving. This can make things look misaligned. Until this bug is fixed, you sometimes have to take a slight step or two while aiming in order to get to the zero point.

The relevant aimed settings are:

horiz, vert and foreward=x (Hipfire model position offsets. Do yourself a huge favor and make sure that your anims are positioned properly in max and all these values should be =0 in gunspec these values may or may not be independent of simplezoom offsets)
runy = x (offset on vertical axis when running only)

simplezoommod = x (in X9 this was usually=0 and in GG it is usually=2. Modifies weapon render FOV to sort of shift the depth axis position)
simplezoomx = x (Aimed Horizontal offset. Should be 0 if your animation is correct with aiming point at x,y =0,0)
simplezoomy = x (Aimed Vertical offset. In GG, =0 is a hair low so I generally use between =0.11 and =0.15 to correct it)

New forGG is a feature to steady when aiming. The variables and my defaults are:
zoomaccuracy = 30 (camera breath sway intensity when aiming)
zoomaccuracybreathhold = 1 (1=enabled, 0=disabled feature)
zoomaccuracybreath = 5000 (breath hold duration max in ms)
zoomaccuracyheld = 1 (sway intensity when breathhold is active)

-Yes, I know aim is steadied not by holding breath but by controlled exhale. Blame Lee

Also new for GG is more control over handling feel regarding move speed and turning rate in both hipfire and aimed modes (this must be enabled in setup.ini. Disabled by default). I have a particular philosophy for the settings I use but I won't go into it other than to say that these settings can greatly differentiate otherwise same-y feeling weapons. Clever use of these can make pistols and more maneuverable weapons feel more agile than and CQB-suitable than bulky ones.

Here is an example of a subcarbine/submachinegun type weapon using my settings:
zoomwalkspeed = 0.7 (movement multiplier when aiming. 0.7 =70% of default speed)
zoomturnspeed = 0.7 (rotation multiplier when aiming. 0.7 =70% of default speed)
plrmovespeedmod = 1.0 (hipfire move speed multiplier. 1.0 = 100%)
plremptyspeedmod = 1.0 (hipfire move speed multiplier when weapon is empty. 1.0 = 100% of default speed)
plrturnspeedmod = 1.0 (hipfire rotation speed multiplier. 1.0 = 100%)
plrjumpspeedmod = 1.0 (hipfire jump acceleration multiplier (N/A when aiming. Space/jump used for hold breath). 1.0 = 100% of default)
plrreloadspeedmod = 0.5 (hipfire rotation speed multiplier. 0.5 = 50% of default speed)

Now, most of those are pretty close to default but you should be able to see how the settings can be used to make knives give better athletic ability or LMGs be super encumbering or snipers be super precise, etc.

The rest of the settings and anim calls are basically the same as in X9.

I had previously planned to put together a forum guide covering all settings but as you can see, it gets lengthy with just a few settings briefly explained. My current plan is to put together a guide on my website so I can use hyperlinks to explore relative details and philosophy of use without it just being a wall of text. Maybe that will need to become an October project. Until then, feel free to ask more questions (the more specific the better) and also check out the following gunspec as it has a large amount of relative variables you might need in making a weapon. The format is also, IMO, pretty clean and organized...


Click this link for a WEBGL 3D preview of the relevant weapon (just for fun) More HERE

Hopefully this will help you get a little further down the path.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 27th Sep 2016 22:25 Edited at: 27th Sep 2016 22:29
I was unaware there were so many new commands for weapons!!!!
I managed to get kshatriya's pistol working with iron sights set up. GG does a great job with it, reminds me of HL2 with how punchy the fire animation looks, but I like my weapons at 110 fov



today, I'll try and use one of the FPSB guns and put it in the hands and see if it causes problems. just to clarify, you're saying the right way to make sure the gun works right is to skin it to one of the hand bones, and not use any helpers or link constraints, correct?
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 02:50 Edited at: 28th Sep 2016 02:55
Cool. Looking good so far. The reason I calibrate for 70 weapon FOV is because they won't nearclip if a user uses the lowest FOV setting and they will still work well at 110. Since these are specifically for your game, obviously you can calibrate for whatever you like.

Yeah, there are a lot. When the weapon system is complete in GG it should be quite good. Still a ways to go though.

Quote: "just to clarify, you're saying the right way to make sure the gun works right is to skin it to one of the hand bones, and not use any helpers or link constraints, correct?"


No. You will still need helper/dummy meshes and then skin the weapon to those dummies. You just gotta be sure the helper meshes also have their xforms and pivots reset before you link them or skin to them to prevent floaty junk, etc. Basically animate the dummies and not the mesh. I use dummies for the gun frame, slide, magazine, hammer, etc as well as an intermediate dummy object (which does not get animated) for linking in between hand and gun. That allows easier positioning of different guns and saves time/hassle if doing a number of weapons.

Also, for performance sake, you will want your weapon to be all one mesh object. Each mesh object accounts for two draw calls. By optimizing this, you can get more mesh fidelity with less GPU load. For example, that pistol is probably around 16 draw calls with the hands but could be reduced to four (two for gun plus two for hands). Hands and gun could be collapsed to one mesh to reduce further but I like to keep separate for workflow convenience.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 04:53
ok im gonna try one with just one dummy, and all gun stuff simply linked together
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Bugsy
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 05:42
same exact problem as before, this time the gun has reversed normals for some reason :C
should the gun have the Xform modifier too? or should just the helpers have them

I left nothing with Xform modifiers (collapsed the stack) and had to run a uv unwrap on it to get the textures together
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Errant AI
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 06:06 Edited at: 28th Sep 2016 06:11
xform then convert to editable mesh and reset pivots for any meshes before you link them. You don't need to retain the xform layer in your stack and collapsing stack after UVing is the right way to go. Is the gun mesh skinned and does it have any keyframes on it? Try exporting with your dummy visible and sometimes you can narrow down problems if, for example, the dummy is in the right spot but the mesh assigned to it is not.

Also, make sure you are not rendering backfaces in max and sometimes after a reset xform, faces need to be flipped (and then xformed again for good measure). Sometimes problematic meshes can be "purged" by creating a new box primitive and then attaching the problem mesh to the box, xforming then deleting the box part.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 08:17


ok, so does this look like the right setup? xforms reset and normals flipped on everything but the hands whihc never gave me problems. gun attached to hand by dummy linked to wrist bone, mag attached by dummy linked to that dummy, and thats both linked to a dummy behind everything called root, which has both arm bones linked to it, and then root is linked to a dummy called control on the front.

I will export into GG and see if it works...



WELL THANK YOU ERRANT AI, I have managed to get the gun into the game, working, with no animation. I will soon try and get some animations going but until then, can you tell me how to remove that overshinyness on the hands? the specular texture has them completely black...

(also I notice that doing all that stuff reset the uvw maps on the hands for some reason)
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Bugsy
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 08:44


managed to fix that UV layout thing by exporting as a fbx then reimporting and exporting as a .x go figure lol. shiny problem persists but not quite as much since its not dark grey arms
will try to get it working fully animated tomorrow. thanks for the help so far once again
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 09:12
Awesome- glad to see that's sorted now

If you haven't already, I strongly suggest testing skinning the weapon mesh to the dummies before you start animating it. Ideally using a single mesh for all weapon components as I described in a previous post. If you set a 1 bone limit when skinning it simplifies things for mechanical animation. It's a little extra setup but will prevent lighting issues later on and improve performance.

That super shininess is from reflection map. You control reflection map strength via the _S (spec) alpha channel. If you have no alpha channel in the map it treats it as max strength. Open up the .dds and fill anything you want non reflective with black. I generally just paste in a copy of the spec map and tweak the levels dark as a starting point and then make things like skin even darker. The reflection strength interpretation is pretty strong. You probably don't want anything brighter than 128 unless the surface is mirror polished.
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Pirate Myke
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 17:18
Great info, thank you both.
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Posted: 28th Sep 2016 19:11
Sure thing, Myke. I'm sure some more will be added sooner or later. Hopefully the info will be helpful to others as well.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 29th Sep 2016 06:19

that is my specular map. I think its as black as it goes on your hand part

I am proud to announce I have successfully got a custom animated gun (on EAI hands) into gameguru finally.



Could you possibly give me an explaination of how the soundframes work/ how to sync sounds with animations so I dont hear the gun going off while I walk around?

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Posted: 29th Sep 2016 07:51 Edited at: 29th Sep 2016 08:10
Still super chromed. Paste the image you posted into the ALPHA channel of the spec map and things should be sorted. Make sure you're saving the .dds at a setting that supports sufficient ARGB quality.

Soundframes are pretty straight forward. The only real rule is that sound1-4 are reserved and should match (in terms of functionality and filename. ie: fire.wav/.ogg should always be sound1, etc.) the sounds in the example I posted. Other sounds can be named whatever and do not need to be assigned to specific sound slots.

in the example you will see

sframe1 = 414,7

That tells GG to play sound7 on frame 414 of the animation. Same as with X9.

Fire and dryfire are automatically called by hardcode and you will not need to list sframes for those.

If the weapon is full auto, set the speed the fire sound effect loops with fireloop=x but be aware that actual fire rate is controlled with firerate=x (lower is faster, approx =4.5 would be appropriate for that rifle). Yes... it's dumb that the audio loop speed is separate from the functionality. Hopefully that will be changed at some point.

With stuff like reloads, I like to split the audio into distinct sections (unload, load and cock) so that I can reuse audio assets between empty and tactical reloads and also because in GG it is possible to modify reload speed via gunspec with reloadspeed =x (100 = 100% of normal speed) and separated audio syncs better if the anim is sped up or slowed down.

Lastly, please note that full-auto firing weapons currently have a sound bug where the audio will be cut as soon as you stop shooting. So, the last gunshot in a full auto string will sound truncated.
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Bugsy
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Posted: 1st Oct 2016 04:52
thank you!

can you explain to me how to affect only the "alpha" channel on my specular map? in photo shop, i go to my "channels" thing but only see R, G, and B
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Posted: 1st Oct 2016 06:40 Edited at: 1st Oct 2016 07:57
There should be a button for add new layer in the channel tab. This will create the alpha channel. I'd post a pic but the last Win10 update messed up something on my PC and I can't open PS (or my external drive) at the moment.

edit:
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3com
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Posted: 1st Oct 2016 21:21
Awesome info, , thank you both.

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Bugsy
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Posted: 10th Nov 2016 23:21
NEW QUESTION: (first post to be updated if necessary)

I've downloaded, setup (xform/normal flip/etc) and rigged this gun correctly. I tried to test if it would work in GG but it did not show up on screen. I noticed that the gun is onscreen, just invisible. there is no alpha in the diffuse texture, and I dont understand why this is happening. please help?


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Bugsy
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Posted: 10th Nov 2016 23:41
FALSE ALARM it was a specular map problem i guess???
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