tri [SKY] Having problems with custom tri files

[Duude98]

Hello! I have been following this tutorial, and while there seems to be no tutorial in existence for exactly what I want to do(feel free to prove me wrong on that, that would actually be almost just as helpful), this one gets me pretty close. I want to take a head mesh from a model in max and create entirely new tri files with it 100% independent from the ones in the game, for a new race I am adding in my mod. I had more success than I initially thought I would, as I actually can get the head mesh to appear in the CK and deform for expressions and lipsyncing, but the deformations basically just do whatever they want. Additionally, the part about the conformulator at the bottom does not really make sense to me. From my perspective, it achieves the same thing that tricreator.exe achieves a few steps earlier in the tutorial(and even when I try to use it, it crashes, or just tells me the morphs weren't applied. It might be windows 10, it might be my tri files - I don't know). Does anyone know what I might be doing wrong? I notice that the tutorial states that if I don't fix the first line from the exported objs in notepad that will most likely be the culprit of broken morphs, but I have double checked all the morphs and they all look good.

femalehead_new.tri

ZoraFemaleHead.nif

[RabidGears]

I re-extracted your Tri and it appears that there are no faces on any of the morph meshes. They're getting stripped out somewhere along the line. I've used that Tri creator a lot so I can confirm that it works.

The first thing we need to do is track down where the faces are getting stripped out. I don't use Max so I'm not familiar with how it exports OBJs. If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the problem happens at that point. Double check your export settings with those shown in the tutorial.

Also check any exported OBJs to make sure that they contain lines beginning with 'f'. For example, you should find something like this:

...
f 1/1 2/2 3/3
f 3/3 4/4 1/1
f 2/2 5/5 6/6
...

On the Conformulator: As I understand it, in the tutorial she's using the Conformulator to adapt extra parts, such as eyebrows or beards, to the new head. I don't think you need to use it for the head Tri, so just ignore that step for now.

I don't know of any other tutorials on TRIs. I used that one when I was learning about this stuff.

Edited April 24, 2016 by RabidGears
.

[Duude98]

Hey, thanks for the reply! It seems that TriCreator.exe is what is stripping the faces, at least to me, as all the obj files pre tri creation are fine. I also double checked my max export settings and those check out as well.

Come to think of it, TriCreator has acted strange in the past to me(for example, it would ignore the last six or so characters in each line in the text document, so I had to add garbage characters to the end of each line so it would read it correctly and compile, but it thankfully stopped doing that).

Finally, I have yet to check each individual obj, but the ones I did check all have those f lines(Though they look more like "f 589/675/2132 545/631/2133 588/674/2134 597/683/2135")

[RabidGears]

I think I see the problem. It looks like the mesh is using quads instead of triangles. I think the TRI format only uses triangles, and so the program is only designed to work with triangles.

So you need to convert the mesh faces of the morphs to triangles before exporting. And make sure that they match up with structure of the mesh in the NIF.

[Duude98]

Thanks, that should help a lot. Unfortunately I am rather inept at 3d modeling, and while I can find plenty of tutorials for converting triangles to quads in max, the only thing I can find for the opposite is to select all the verts on the given mesh and hit connect, which did not fix the problem. Do you know how to achieve this, or can at least point me in the right direction?

[RabidGears]

I use Blender. I don't know how to do it in Max.

[Duude98]

Ok, well thanks anyway. I was tipped off by a friend that exporting nifs through max automatically converts to triangles, and so I decided to export to nif and then convert them to obj through nifskope. That kept the faces from being stripped, and they compile and decompile into tri files fine now, but the initial problem was not solved. The morphs still do whatever they want. I know that I am close now though!

femalehead_new.tri

[RabidGears]

Yeah, the face issue looks like it's solved. I can import it into Blender now. I can see some obvious problems with parts of the mesh pulled all over the place, especially the eyes.

Can you import the TRI into Max?

 

Edited April 27, 2016 by RabidGears
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[Duude98]

I can import tris into max, but each morph looks exactly the same to me... I could be using it wrong though. The max plugin is kinda finicky, and I tried the blender plugin but I couldn't get it to work at all

Edited April 27, 2016 by Duude98

[RabidGears]

The Blender plugin is for Blender 2.49. It doesn't work with the newest version of Blender.

I'm pretty sure that the eyeballs and inside of the mouth should not be part of the head mesh. They should have their own separate NIFs and TRIs.

The issue that I mentioned before looks like the eye rims (or whatever they're called) of each eye are getting stretched over to the other eye, with part of them clipping through the eye balls in the process. This happens in most of the morphs, but not all of them.

Apart from that, though, the morphs look fine to me and shouldn't cause the issues that appear in that screenshot. Maybe try making a fresh record to test out your new tri just in case the CK is refusing to recognise the new one.

 

[Duude98]

Hm, I see what you mean with the eye thing. I was hoping to get away with not bothering with adding the new eye models, because the race is fish people and their eyes could reasonably just be solid black, but it does seem to be causing problems. I did also try to make a new headpart for the race, and that did actually help!  The various morphs do somewhat resemble expressions now, but they are still very glitchy...

So, I guess the next thing to try would be to delete the inside of the mouth and the eyes and see if that makes the morphs not do that?

[RabidGears]

Yes, I think it would be a good idea to start with deleting the eyes and mouth. It might also be a good idea to replace the eyes with eye sockets like the way vanilla head meshes are done.

I'm pretty sure that you need to make all the morphs again from the nif, otherwise you may run into vertex order issues.

The way I always do TRIs is:

- Import my finished NIF into Nifskope

- Export it as an OBJ

- Duplicate that OBJ for each morph, giving them the appropriate morph names

- Create the TRI

- Import TRI into Blender to edit the morphs

Using this method I've never had any issues with TRIs. You can quickly test out a new TRI by only editing one of the morphs just to make sure that it works properly in the CK.