CHRONO CROSS FILE EXPLORATION THREAD

[cornettheory]

I think part of the problem with people's blender renders, is that blender, by default, uses interpolation and mip maps on the textures.  But the textures in the game aren't interpolated.  so the very edge of flea's face texture is by a black row.  I turned off interpolation and I got a better result this time, but I still think the problem is with the mesh at this point.

It also is a possibility that knowing the limitations of PSX hardware, the original developers left the UV right on the edge like this just because they knew you can't see it in game.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[cornettheory]

Good news!

The small fire dragon can scratch his back with his feet!

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Luminaire85]

cornettheory, you will have much better luck if you use the latest version of my script, which I have attached. Per your suggestion it turns off mipmapping and interpolation, plus takes the necessary steps to enable transparency in rendering.

A suggestion for future texture rips: save them as PNGs rather than bitmaps, since PNGs can handle transparency. Also for this context PNG will usually be smaller than BMP with no loss in quality.


[attachment deleted by admin]

[FaustWolf]

The 128x256 Flea rip is correct as far as I can tell. Luckily Flea's field battle model texture is identical to the battle model texture but in Classic TIM format, and thus detectable by PSicture and other programs. I mapped some of the UV triangles indicated in the battle model data over the field texture, and the triangles look good:
http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/4442/fleatestjt7.png

The field texture is attached, but it should be identical to the 128x256 texture I ripped last night. Hopefully any outstanding problems with the texture can be chalked away to the interpolation issue...

[attachment deleted by admin]

[cornettheory]

script works, now for those pesky textures...

[attachment deleted by admin]

[cornettheory]

Here are some things I noticed with flea at this point...

yea, the texture wasn't dumped with alpha so just ignore that

[attachment deleted by admin]

[FaustWolf]

Hmm, the Flea result is starkly different from what Luminaire produced on May 18:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,4770.msg96541.html#msg96541

That looked fine with the exception of the face line. Wonder what happened?

[Luminaire85]

What happened is Blender's render mode uses a few different settings than Blender's working mode (as it would be far too slow to do otherwise). At the moment this leaves a bit of a catch-22: either get the transparency right or get the overlapping faces right.

See attached for an example of what I mean. The box on the right Flea is a render preview; otherwise the two are identical.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Unaisis]

i get the same problem too when they are imported to Cinema 4d, but i instinctively fixed the problem by manually moving the polygons and points @.@.... soo many models turn up like this XD i'm used to it. ::Models mostly from Square E-nix::

[MDenham]

After looking through the Blender manual, it looks like what's happening is, for whatever reason, the automatic normal-flipping process isn't being applied to models generated with the script.

See here, and look at the "Single sided faces (backface culling)" section - the "No V. Normal Flip" setting mentioned here might be on when it shouldn't be.

[tushantin]

Whoa, looks cool!! xD I wanna try ripping the models and using em! Although I've simply used Metsequoia and Animation:Master (I don't know em properly though) and just started using blender. Dunno how I can help you guys.

[FaustWolf]

Phew, well, guess we could use render mode for transparency issues and normal 3D viewing mode for most other models, for the time being at least. BTW, I see that I can set palette transparencies on my end with the .PNG files just like a .GIF. Luminaire, would it help any if I set all RGB = 0,0,0 colors to be totally transparent? Given what halkun said earlier, I'm not sure if it would make a difference.

tushantin, if you have a PC capable of handling Blender, you're already ahead of the game as far as I'm concerned. Even if you can just load up models with Luminaire's script and take screencaps, it's better than I can do right now -- I think my ATI Express graphics card chokes on the program, and when I fiddle with the graphics card settings, my PC tends to crash randomly.

[tushantin]

tushantin, if you have a PC capable of handling Blender, you're already ahead of the game as far as I'm concerned. Even if you can just load up models with Luminaire's script and take screencaps, it's better than I can do right now -- I think my ATI Express graphics card chokes on the program, and when I fiddle with the graphics card settings, my PC tends to crash randomly.

Well I use Blender at my workspace normally, but I assume it works at home as well.  :lol:And besides, just this June I reckon I'll be buying a PC with 4GB DDR 2 RAM and GeForce 8800 GTS! So how do I do what I need to do?

[Luminaire85]

tushantin, you will need to download the latest version of my Blender import script, which is attached to a recent post of mine in this thread. The instructions for using the script are contained in the comments at the top of the file. Basically it's (1) install Blender, (2) put script in appropriate directory, and (3) use script from within Blender. If anything is not clear, let me know so I can elaborate in future versions of the script.

You will also need the battle model data and textures, of course. I only know a little bit about that, so I won't elaborate.

FaustWolf, I would go ahead and set all of the (0,0,0) black to transparent in the texture files if it's convenient to do. This is necessary for the Blender renderer to process the transparency.

[FaustWolf]

Time for some bumpage. Vehek, Unaisis and I discovered what appears to be a texture stretching issue with the import script. When, say, a 128x128 texture gets fed through the importer, it seems to get stretched to a 128x256 texture. See the results in the following posts:
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,5177.msg97464.html#msg97464
http://www.chronocompendium.com/Forums/index.php/topic,5454.msg97502.html#msg97502

Does your script currently assume a 128x256 texture Luminaire, and if so, is it plausible that it would stretch 128x128 textures to 128x256 textures as a side effect? Could this be changed easily? On the bright side, the script loads the 3D data of field models perfectly.