Hello all,
So, I'm not much of a programmer, but I have art skills, so I decided to try to help out here. I'm taking a crack at working on the meshes themselves. I started with something easy: one of Suzu's Tamer meshes which just needed to be smoothed out a little and didn't need a lot of work (Suzu does great work). It seemed a good place to start.
I used PACtool and made the three lod files just fine. But PACtool didn't put them in the "bones" folder, it just put them in the same folder as the converter... which was weird... but okay.
I went on ahead and edited the mesh lod0 (Which I reasoned was the "highest detail" version) in Blender with no real issue and saved the mesh as a .dae file.
But then I tried to go the other way and nothing happened. It didn't make a Pac file. I couldn't find a .pac file anywhere.
I tried both having the lod files in the directory where the converter put them before (PACtool root), and I moved them into the "bones" folder (And I changed the .bat file both times).
Here's how I have edited the .bat file for dae_to_pac:
PACtool.exe -replaceAllLOD -r pbw_00_nude_0001_mesh00_lod0.dae pbw_00_nude_0001.pac bones/pbw.pab
Any idea what I'm doing wrong here? I get tripped up on the programming stuff (Like -r and -replaceALLLOD and checkmarked boxes), so any help would be appreciated :)
Is there more detailed documentation on PACtool than in the Reporseless thread?
While we are at it: Does Blender delete the bones from a mesh? I didn't do anything to the mesh at all except work on the vertices and surface... but I thought I saw a quick warning about bones. Is there a setting I need to make sure is set in Blender to ensure we keep the figure's bones?
Is anyone using Blender to edit meshes and can they give me advice on how to set Blender so that I don't make newbie mistakes? For example: Does anyone use modifiers to make the three lod models? I hope no one is actually hand-modelling three different models for each level of detail. If Suzu is doing that, and still putting out so many models per day, my respect for him has skyrocketed! :)
Thanks!