Spotlight: Señor Casaroja's Noesis

[garnetfanatico]

garnetfanatico,
-scale 250 command will give you the proper scale.

Thank you firsak it works perfect now

[MrAdults]

Alright, thanks for replying and I apologize if I offended you. I just suggested a possible .CHR viewer as I know obtaining Xenosaga models can be quite a pain and that this would make it a bit easier on alot of people. Again, thank you for responding and for your updates.

It takes a whole lot to offend me these days, so you don't have to worry about that. I just wanted people to know that I can't afford the time to keep taking special requests. Often times when I ignore people there, they get angry at me because they don't seem to understand that they are but one of many people that want something from me, and that I'm trying to juggle dozens of responsibilities outside of the particular project that they have interest in. I understand both sides pretty well, since I know it also sucks to want something in some popular piece of software and be totally ignored by the software's author. That's happened to me plenty of times. I can imagine that I might not empathize with it as well, if I didn't have 15 years of experience making free shit and getting everything from unreasonable feature requests to blatant hate-mail in response to my efforts. In any case, though, yeah. I'm just doing this stuff because it's fun, in the end, and that's why it's free. So thanks for the thanks.

I've also requested a site review from Google now, so that should probably be cleared up soon. Maybe. I still have no idea how long these things usually take.

[MrAdults]

Noesis v1.8 is up now on the usual place. Of course, it contains nothing but stuff most of you will not care about at all.

-Made MD3 export path handle NULL UV's.
-Added import and export support for Heretic 2 .m8 textures.
-Added import support for Heretic 2 .fm models. Vertex animations are handled, but reference/node/skeletal data is not.
-Added support for paletted images in PNG and TGA loaders.
-Added support for SiN variant of Quake PAK format.
-Added import support for SiN SBM/SAM model/frame data.
-New support for ".noesis" scene files. This is a text-based format which allows custom scenes to be crafted with simulated physics, but functionality is still limited. Two scenes are included, one of which references an implementation of the ODE physics library.

The scene/physics simulation stuff is partially for an unrelated research project (monkeys and limbs) and Noesis just happened to be a nice platform to experiment for it. There is some crude auto-ragdolling functionality so that you can plug any skeletal model into a scene and watch it ragdoll. But of course, the constraints are fixed and it creates a simulated body for every single bone on the model. (but it does try to be intelligent about whether it fills gaps with capsules or caps off bone hierarchies with spheres) So with really complex skeletons it will probably bring the program to a crawl. Making the default bone radius too big is also a pretty bad idea. (unsolvable joint overlaps mean the physics engine will go to hell)

It's also possible to use this system in the future to get physics data decoded for games, though. It's implemented with a generic plugin interface, allowing any physics engine to be adapted without modifying Noesis itself.

[tyb51]

2Mr. Adult

I have a question i got models from FFXIII and if i export them i get like 15 texture files. Isnt it possible to make that some textures less because it gets realy difficult and time consuming to get all the textures on the right place (i didn't succees till know).

Probably you won't be able to do something about it but I could always ask.

[firsak]

MrAdults,

When loading certain DAEs (sample) Noesis won't read some meshes, and if you re-export this file through Noesis - those meshes disappear completely. Check out the eyes (object1, object2).

Probably not a bug and you just didn't hack the format completely: Crisis Core skeletons are screwed (bone positions are wrong).

Regarding the previous "non-power-of-two DXT-compressed images to non-DXT formats" bug. Noesis now simply skips those images. Could you make it export those image in their default format, rather than simply skip them?

Thanks for listening.

[MrAdults]

I have a question i got models from FFXIII and if i export them i get like 15 texture files. Isnt it possible to make that some textures less because it gets realy difficult and time consuming to get all the textures on the right place (i didn't succees till know).

That's just how the models are broken up and textured. I don't think it would be worth making a texture-combine+uv-compensation export option.

When loading certain DAEs (sample) Noesis won't read some meshes, and if you re-export this file through Noesis - those meshes disappear completely. Check out the eyes (object1, object2).

Those meshes are not registered as triangle meshes, so as you will see on export, "Warning: Only pure triangle meshes are supported for conversion." Although they appear to be 3-sided polygons anyway, so it's kind of silly that they are not just triangle meshes. I'm currently too lazy to implement non-triangle primitives for import, but maybe one day.

Probably not a bug and you just didn't hack the format completely: Crisis Core skeletons are screwed (bone positions are wrong).

The skeleton data is not entirely contained in those models, only the hierarchy is. So the orientations are filled in based on weights. Most likely the proper skeletal data is in the same file as the animations, and I never bothered to locate it. Nor did the other guy that was working on the format with me. I can't say it's likely I'll ever get back to it, as the data is long gone from my HD, and it's pretty unlikely I will ever be motivated to re-rip my UMD.

Regarding the previous "non-power-of-two DXT-compressed images to non-DXT formats" bug. Noesis now simply skips those images. Could you make it export those image in their default format, rather than simply skip them?

Just set the image export target to "Default" if you want them in their "default format". I didn't feel like modifying my software DXT decoder to handle non-block-aligned dimensions (I made some assumptions there when writing it, my bad), and re-targeting the export target at that point in the pipeline is out of the way, so crash prevention is the best you're gonna get.

[ultimaespio]

Are the battle fields in FF7 viewable or is it just the character models?

[pixellegolas]

adults, while you are looking for a job and money you could at least place a donate button on your homepage and that might generate at least a small sum to pay for food

[MrAdults]

adults, while you are looking for a job and money you could at least place a donate button on your homepage and that might generate at least a small sum to pay for food

I'm not doing that badly. At least, I should have another few grand coming in from my recently-released game soon. I should really still be looking for a job in advance, but I've been too lazy lately. Can't stop playing Harmony of Despair. And Aion. My will to actually work and/or live has been at a minimum lately.

Most of my expense is in my mortgage, which I don't think paypal donations would come anywhere close to covering. So it's not really worth it, because I fundamentally don't like to ask people for money pertaining to my hobby projects. Largely because I do them for fun, and because I can't promise I'd spend any more time on them even if people were throwing a few bucks at me every now and then. It would just make life more horrible if people were giving me 5 dollar donations and feeling entitled to 500 dollars worth of my time as a contract programmer in return.

Also, never looked at any FF7 model other than the PSX battle models (because they were staring me in the face right there on the disc and I wanted them for direct reference in AVALANCHE). So if the formats are not identical, it's likely no other FF7 models are supported.

[firsak]

MrAdults,
Could you fix the bug with incorrect bone orientations in Lost Planet/Resident Evil 5?
From what I understand you're using Surveyor's code. His mod2max originally had this bug:



But you have fixed it for Devil May Cry 4:



Can you do the same for LP/RE5 models?

[MrAdults]

Noesis's .mod format module is itself written from scratch, and the bone stuff I had to decypher from scratch too (I couldn't find usable info on it in the code posted by Surveyor and revelation, but maybe I missed something), so any mutual bugs are just coincidental I guess.

The format is treated exactly the same between DMC4/LP/RE5 as well. So you'd have to tell me which model(s) specifically you see a problem with. All of the models I've checked out from all 3 games have perfectly correct skeletons, so I don't actually have the slightest idea what you're talking about.

[chrrox]

I think he is using the wrong dae plugin in max.

[MrAdults]

Ah, yeah, that would explain it. You can verify that by whether it looks correct in the Noesis preview, though.

Also, I just stuck 1.9 up. Didn't get a chance to finish a lot of stuff I've been meaning to work on, but here's what's there.

-Corrected a texture load path bug with .noesis files.
-Added support for extracting GCF (Valve) files. Tested with format version 1.6, support for other versions is questionable.
-Added import support for Valve VTF textures. Only supports a limited set of image types, and was only tested with v7.1 images.
-Added import support for Source MDL models. Only tested with format version 44.
-Added import support for Quake MDL.
-Added import support for FF8 battle models/animations.
-Made HL .map support actually work again. (loads halflife.wad if it's in the working directory, to generate proper texcoords)
-Changed default coordinate system for Heretic 2, SiN, and Q3A models.

[firsak]

The contents of this post was deleted because of possible forum rules violation.

[ultimaespio]

Thanks for the FF8 support

I've noticed that it crashes when trying to load Zell's weapons:

d1w008.dat
d1w009.dat
d1w0010.dat
d1w0011.dat

Quistis' weapons appear a little mangled:



d3w018.dat
d3w019.dat
d3w020.dat
d3w021.dat