Advanced Mesh Reaper - Xtreme Edition
Posted: Thu May 27, 2021 4:54 pm
1) Introduction
Advanced Mesh Reaper - Xtreme Edition, abbreviated AXE, is a complete reconstruction of the existing Advanced Mesh Reaper, abbreviated AMR, and comes with a lot of exclusive new features.
Unlike AMR, AXE is designed to support as many vertex attributes as possible. Apart from positions, normals and texcoords, AXE supports also tangents, binormals, vertex colors, blend indices and blend weights. It also introduced an "Auto Bone Generation" system in order to actually support skinning info, which might be the biggest highlight when compared with AMR.
AXE also attempts to become more flexible so as to deal with different data structures. A mesh object can now be described with multiple polygon and vertex parameter sets which provides a possibility to handle and validate variable-length data structure, or simply to merge a set of sub-meshes into a single object. When there's only one parameter set for polygon and vertex attributes, AXE will then degenerate itself into the exact same workflow as AMR.
2) Change Log
3) User Interface
Refer to the AXE Demo for a peek on its capabilities.
Get the version fit with the demonstration here.
4) Main Features
1. Ability to specify individual data source files for polygon and vertex attributes, or to use a single source for all channels;
2. Support for material assignment and management;
3. Support for assigning multiple materials to different polygon sets of a single mesh;
4. Flexible mesh constructing workflows based on parameter set system;
5. Support for all kinds of vertex attributes including positions, texture coordinates, TBN vectors, vertex colors and skinning info;
6. Ability to handle position bounding box to retain the in-game scaling;
7. Support for multiple UV channels without limit on amount;
8. Support for applying textures on any specified UV channel;
9. Ability to merge sub-meshes into a single object or to split a mesh group into physically detached sub-meshes;
10. Support for mesh transformation including translation, rotation, scaling and axis inversion;
11. Ability to automatically generate a set of bone nodes from existing skinning info, and provides tools for editing and constructing a usable skeleton based on the result;
12. Data interpretation and statistics analysis for polygon and vertex attributes;
13. Support for saving/loading all params to/from the parameter list container format;
14. Helper tool to reorganize data referenced by indices;
15. Visualization for positions, texcoords, TBN vectors, vertex colors and skeleton.
5) Example Model Extracted by the Tool
6) Notes
There are some components used or required by AXE which are not likely to be changed frequently so they're detached from the release of the AXE executable.
The first component is an external mesh viewer called "ViewScene" which AXE uses to preview the model with different attributes.
It's similar to the one used by AMR but it has been extended for the needs of AXE.
The second component is required by AXE for its GUI is based on Qt technology thus it requires the Qt dependencies for execution.
These components can be downloaded through the links provided in the attachment.
You must place both the ViewScene folder and the Qt dependencies into the same path of the AXE executable.
The overall folder layout of AXE should be:
Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable (x86) or above is required for runtime.
7) Download
Advanced Mesh Reaper - Xtreme Edition, abbreviated AXE, is a complete reconstruction of the existing Advanced Mesh Reaper, abbreviated AMR, and comes with a lot of exclusive new features.
Unlike AMR, AXE is designed to support as many vertex attributes as possible. Apart from positions, normals and texcoords, AXE supports also tangents, binormals, vertex colors, blend indices and blend weights. It also introduced an "Auto Bone Generation" system in order to actually support skinning info, which might be the biggest highlight when compared with AMR.
AXE also attempts to become more flexible so as to deal with different data structures. A mesh object can now be described with multiple polygon and vertex parameter sets which provides a possibility to handle and validate variable-length data structure, or simply to merge a set of sub-meshes into a single object. When there's only one parameter set for polygon and vertex attributes, AXE will then degenerate itself into the exact same workflow as AMR.
2) Change Log
Code: Select all
2021.12.23 - v1.3.0 Added an option to the Tools for batch generating materials of different base colors;
Added an option to the Tools for importing skeleton from external bone nodes dump;
Added a bone index base parameter for adjusting the final blend indices;
Fixed force noramlization of tangent & binormal not working for data interpretation;
Fixed incorrectly saving of vertex params in PLC file;
Fixed implict index encoding error;
Fixed ineffectiveness of relative address sub-switches for TBN vectors;
Fixed constraint for min value of All Same Stride in some scenarios.
2021.10.10 - v1.2.0 Removed the global position divisor factor from Preference;
Added a local "Positions Unit Factor" option to the vertex parameter section;
Added an option to inverse TBN vectors;
Added an option to force noramlization on TBN vectors;
Added sub switches of Relative Address, All Same (of Stride) and All Same (of Data Type) for all vertex attributes;
Adjustments on the UI and the PLF definitions due to the above changes.
2021.10.01 - v1.1.1 Fixed an issue that the vertex parameter sets combo box might contain incorrect amount of items;
Fixed an issue where memory was allocated insufficiently for stripped indices;
Fixed an issue which prevented certain data type params from being loaded.
2021.07.17 - v1.1.0 Fixed an issue that prevents from generating implicit indices when material group params are not used;
Added option to dump decoded polygon vertex indices to specified file;
Added option to specify individual data source for reference indices in the Data Reorganizer;
Support for passing a shared source data file path argument through command line;
Added error identifiers for polygons if duplicate value detected upon interpretation;
Added a global position divisor factor to Preference.
2021.06.05 - v1.0.2 Fixed a bug that crashed the program when adding a triangle strip mesh param to the list;
Minor optimizations for Preference and PLC statistics calculation.
2021.05.27 - v1.0.1 Initial release.
Refer to the AXE Demo for a peek on its capabilities.
Get the version fit with the demonstration here.
4) Main Features
1. Ability to specify individual data source files for polygon and vertex attributes, or to use a single source for all channels;
2. Support for material assignment and management;
3. Support for assigning multiple materials to different polygon sets of a single mesh;
4. Flexible mesh constructing workflows based on parameter set system;
5. Support for all kinds of vertex attributes including positions, texture coordinates, TBN vectors, vertex colors and skinning info;
6. Ability to handle position bounding box to retain the in-game scaling;
7. Support for multiple UV channels without limit on amount;
8. Support for applying textures on any specified UV channel;
9. Ability to merge sub-meshes into a single object or to split a mesh group into physically detached sub-meshes;
10. Support for mesh transformation including translation, rotation, scaling and axis inversion;
11. Ability to automatically generate a set of bone nodes from existing skinning info, and provides tools for editing and constructing a usable skeleton based on the result;
12. Data interpretation and statistics analysis for polygon and vertex attributes;
13. Support for saving/loading all params to/from the parameter list container format;
14. Helper tool to reorganize data referenced by indices;
15. Visualization for positions, texcoords, TBN vectors, vertex colors and skeleton.
5) Example Model Extracted by the Tool
6) Notes
There are some components used or required by AXE which are not likely to be changed frequently so they're detached from the release of the AXE executable.
The first component is an external mesh viewer called "ViewScene" which AXE uses to preview the model with different attributes.
It's similar to the one used by AMR but it has been extended for the needs of AXE.
The second component is required by AXE for its GUI is based on Qt technology thus it requires the Qt dependencies for execution.
These components can be downloaded through the links provided in the attachment.
You must place both the ViewScene folder and the Qt dependencies into the same path of the AXE executable.
The overall folder layout of AXE should be:
Code: Select all
AXE/AXE.exe
AXE/ViewScene/*
AXE/platforms/*
AXE/Qt5**.dll
7) Download