Spotlight: Señor Casaroja's Noesis

[kawayide]

Hello MrAdault, batch process always export animation as rda format.
how to export to other formats?

[MrAdults]

-animoutex ".fbx" (or whatever extension you want) There's also -animoutidx for the case that more than one format shares extensions, but the index to use varies based on plugin/script configurations, and the process of figuring it out is incomprehensible to most humans.

[kawayide]

-animoutex ".fbx" (or whatever extension you want) There's also -animoutidx for the case that more than one format shares extensions, but the index to use varies based on plugin/script configurations, and the process of figuring it out is incomprehensible to most humans.

This option seems not mentioned any where in noesis? this is a usefull option.

[MrAdults]

I guess it's missing from the commands list. I'll put it in there. Not that anyone is likely to dig through all of that crap to find it.

[TheDude]

I was playing around with Frosty's DXT/un-tile code recently and used Noesis to troubleshoot the one texture format that wouldn't work.
(Noesis worked flawlessly btw).
I was wondering if MrAdults (or anyone ) could provide more info on "rapi.imageDecodeDXT(noesis.FOURCC_DXT1NORMAL)"
I tried looking up anything related to DXT1 normal maps (code-wise), but I'm guessing Microsoft has a "special" name for it.

[MrAdults]

The 360 actually supports custom DXT bit packing, so developers can use packing schemes that have no named standard. That's one of the more common ones (since it makes good sense to use it), which is why I added it to Noesis as a named format. It stores just the x and y using all of the color bits.

[MrAdults]

-4.0849 - Added import/export of crunch texture compression library (v1.04) .crn files. Thanks to Rich Geldreich for writing the crunch library.
-4.0849 - Added -fbxsmoothgroups to compute smoothing groups from vertex normals when exporting to FBX.
-4.0849 - Fixed a crash when loading TPL image lists with bad offsets.
-4.0849 - Fixed a crash when loading HL MDL's that specify no movement on a given axis of the motion bone while providing an invalid motion bone index.

[TheDude]

Crunch support is a pretty cool idea.
I'm looking at the (sort of) related libsquish source so my Autodesk Star Ocean: TLH importers can handle X360 CTX1 textures (noesis.FOURCC_DXT1NORMAL).

Inquiring minds want to know - "What will he add to Noesis next.......?"

[MrAdults]

CTX1 actually isn't the same thing, although it will probably "look" right. Different coefficients.

I don't have any specific plans for what's next. chrrox had asked me for crunch support a long time ago, and an old coworker needed the FBX smoothing groups, which is the only reason those got done. Probably no new major features for a while, no energy outside of work and I'm planning on being as far away from all code as possible on my next vacation.

[TheDude]

CTX1 actually isn't the same thing, although it will probably "look" right. Different coefficients.

I don't have any specific plans for what's next. chrrox had asked me for crunch support a long time ago, and an old coworker needed the FBX smoothing groups, which is the only reason those got done. Probably no new major features for a while, no energy outside of work and I'm planning on being as far away from all code as possible on my next vacation.

I just started learning about these formats so I have a waayyyyyyyssssss to go.
I'm more than happy to take "looking right" for now. Plus I can't tell there's any visible artifacts or anything - the textures look pretty clean.
(left image has CTX1 header, right image is average DXT1 dds from PS3 version)

Also I definitely understand how one could NOT want to look at code for a while...

[MrAdults]

I did some stuff today.

-4.0861 - Changed behavior of export dialog so that it stays open and allows re-exporting without closing.
-4.086 - Added a new preference in the data viewer, "Persistent settings->Other->Default preview commands". Adding stuff to this string will cause it to be executed on model preview import, so that you can enable non-default options or perform actual processing by default in the model preview. So if you wanted to, for example, see FF8's animation scales in the preview, you'd set that string to "-ff8animscale".
-4.086 - Added support for scale data in FF8 animations. It's disabled by default, because it requires non-uniform scales which will upset a bunch of things. Including the FBX SDK. Use -ff8animscale to enable.
-4.086 - Added big-endian byte order for bit reads/writes to the bitstream interface. Exposed in Python via NoeBitStream's setByteEndianForBits.
-4.086 - Various fixes for the bitstream reader/writer. Now supports > 64-bit reads/writes.
-4.086 - Prevent GetAttributesOf from being called on large zip files in the terrible MFC shell view, because it sometimes decides to spend minutes trying to determine if said zip files have any "subfolders".
-4.086 - Various minor interface bug fixes.
-4.086 - Someone managed to get a memory alloc failure and subsequent crash while trying to load an insanely large JPEG image, so that case is handled gracefully now.

Note that COLLADA handles non-uniform scaled matrices nicely. The FBX SDK does horrible things with them. Decomposing them myself and feeding them to the FBX SDK as separate rotation/translation/scale would be a workaround, but that's work, and I didn't feel like doing more work.

[lionheartuk]

I did some stuff today.

-4.0861 - Changed behavior of export dialog so that it stays open and allows re-exporting without closing.
-4.086 - Added a new preference in the data viewer, "Persistent settings->Other->Default preview commands". Adding stuff to this string will cause it to be executed on model preview import, so that you can enable non-default options or perform actual processing by default in the model preview. So if you wanted to, for example, see FF8's animation scales in the preview, you'd set that string to "-ff8animscale".
-4.086 - Added support for scale data in FF8 animations. It's disabled by default, because it requires non-uniform scales which will upset a bunch of things. Including the FBX SDK. Use -ff8animscale to enable.
-4.086 - Added big-endian byte order for bit reads/writes to the bitstream interface. Exposed in Python via NoeBitStream's setByteEndianForBits.
-4.086 - Various fixes for the bitstream reader/writer. Now supports > 64-bit reads/writes.
-4.086 - Prevent GetAttributesOf from being called on large zip files in the terrible MFC shell view, because it sometimes decides to spend minutes trying to determine if said zip files have any "subfolders".
-4.086 - Various minor interface bug fixes.
-4.086 - Someone managed to get a memory alloc failure and subsequent crash while trying to load an insanely large JPEG image, so that case is handled gracefully now.

Note that COLLADA handles non-uniform scaled matrices nicely. The FBX SDK does horrible things with them. Decomposing them myself and feeding them to the FBX SDK as separate rotation/translation/scale would be a workaround, but that's work, and I didn't feel like doing more work.

Some pretty cool things in that update, surprised to see you go back to an old game like FF8 though.
I'm still quietly hoping someone will one day make a tool for viewing&exporting the FF9 world map, I once found a viewer, but no exporter, same with FF8's map. Would that be something complex to add to Noesis? I imagine the world map probabl consists of several 'pieces' that're somewhat stitched together to create a full map.

[Devilot]

ff8 support is brilliant

[MrAdults]

Adding support for FF8's world map format wouldn't be inherently complex, it would just require figuring the format out. Assuming no one else has already. I'm sure it would be a fraction of the effort that figuring out the battle model and animation format was, but it's not really on my radar because it requires a non-0 level of effort.

Also,

-4.0863 - Added rapi.imageFromMortonOrder and rapi.imageToMortonOrder.
-4.0862 - Wine hack - Currently Wine's implementation of SHGetPathFromIDList is broken, so Noesis will display all files in the shell list when "All Files" is selected even if this function fails.
-4.0862 - Wine hack - Currently Wine screws something up with the CRT when the Noesis preview module is reloaded. This doesn't happen when the CRT is dynamically linked, but switching from static linking just because Wine is broken would be a bad idea. To work around the Wine bug, browse to your file in the shell view using the above-mentioned hack and use the standard export option instead. Thanks to Riker191 for sending me the Wine crash reports that allowed me to track this crap down.
-4.0862 - Updated Noesis core module to new VC runtimes.

[dragbody]

Mr. Adults,

I love Noesis. I use it literally every day. I'm glad to see you still offering support and updates for it. To help enrich the program, I have three suggestions/questions.

First, is it possible that you can make the global UV flip a function that can be hotkeyed? If there is already a way to do this, could you please advise me on it?

Second, I'm unsure of what the "export from preview" function is for. I hoped it would convert only the meshes rendered in the preview window but this does not seem to be the case. Can you add, or is there already, an option that will avoid the conversion of meshes that have been skip-rendered? This way, if there are multiple LODs in the same mesh, we would be able to convert the model with only the highest LOD.

Third, is there a way to preview multiple models at the same time?

Thank you again. I can't imagine modding without Noesis!