sorry for the creepy thread-title, but I was messing and thinking around how to get some more alien heads on top of 'normal' pc-bodys.

beeing new to 3d-modelling, some of this will probably sound newbieish, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who can learn, if such questions get answered here ...

- is it possible to chop off the head of a full-body-head model including the animations? if so, how? (i tried as a stupid-but-simple approach to just delete all the parts of the model below the head in GMax, but you don't even wanna know what strange abdominations I got ;))

- how can a part of a model's texture be made completely transparent (if it can be done)?
I was thinking about this, 'cause if you use a full-body-model as a pc-head, you get the full body 'standing' on the pc body, so if you could move the whole thing down and make everything but the head transparent ... might be an idea to follow.

- anybody knows why there are head-only textures for quarren and weequay in tsl, but no head-only models (or am I just too stupid to find them?)?

- what's the safest way to move a (head-)model around (down/up) without changing anything else about it (animations, ...)?


Thanks for any help :)!

- is it possible to chop off the head of a full-body-head model including the animations? if so, how? (i tried as a stupid-but-simple approach to just delete all the parts of the model below the head in GMax, but you don't even wanna know what strange abdominations I got ;))
I havent' actually tried this, because it would be so easy for everything to go wrong. It should be possible, since I know there is a mod that took the head off of a full body Duro, and made it usable as a seperate head (here http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=204574). It doesn't have any facial animations though. I think that it might require a mix of merging models and adding polys to heads. See the tutorial section for more, but these are the two I'm thinking of:
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=204225)
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?t=204094)

Again, I have NO idea if it would actually work.

What you could try is after making the ascii.mdl, use notepad and delete the unwanted parts with text edit. Each portion should start with "node" and end with "endnode". Just be sure to leave in the bones, dummies and helpers that a head model usually has (I don't know if you need to leave in or take out the neck bones).

Then see if it will still open in gmax. If it does, move things around so the the neck lines up with the big base square (I forgot what it's called). If it doesn't open, then you're missing some bones or helpers (I guess).

If it exports again, you'll have to try the method that Miro42 came up with.

You can see why I haven't bothered trying? :raise: Too many ways for it to mess up and frustrate me :headbump. Good Luck :)

- how can a part of a model's texture be made completely transparent (if it can be done)?
I was thinking about this, 'cause if you use a full-body-model as a pc-head, you get the full body 'standing' on the pc body, so if you could move the whole thing down and make everything but the head transparent ... might be an idea to follow.
well, you'd make parts of a texture transparent by using an alpha channel with the default shader (the default is transparent).

I doubt this would work the way you want it to. I'm guessing that the animations would never sync up. For example, the headless visible body would be turning to the left while the invisible body would turn to the right; creating a gap between the visible head and visible body.

- anybody knows why there are head-only textures for quarren and weequay in tsl, but no head-only models (or am I just too stupid to find them?)?
the full body models of many humanoid characters use two textures for one model. This allows for more detail and higher resolutions while keeping file size down. Example; two 512x512 px tgas use less MB than one 1024x1024 px tga.

- what's the safest way to move a (head-)model around (down/up) without changing anything else about it (animations, ...)?
use the Taina's replacer method. The problem though, is that Taina's program doesn't change the coordinates of the helpers (like mask hook or goggle hook), so those might have to be done with hex editing (and I can't really explain that very well). As long as you aren't changing the general dimensions of the head too seriously (ie keep the eyes really close to the original height), then you shouldn't have to worry much about the helpers.

thanks for all the tips, redrob, they're great!

at the moment, I'm pretty sure that getting a fully animated alien-head on a human-body CAN be done indeed.
I used the node-deleting method with a text editor on the ascii-mdl file of a weequay head. I'm still having some trouble getting everything into the correct position in gmax afterwards, but I'm pretty sure that can be done.
the big problem I have now, is that if I use Taina's Replacer to compile the model, it re-adds the whole body-model back in (just as it did when I deleted the body-parts directly in Gmax).
If I compile the head with mdlops, it works fine and I have a Weequay head to start the game, but as is well known, when head-models are compiled with mdlops, they're bumping around wildly instead of sticking to the neck.
I tried using another head-model instead of the original weequay model for Taina's Replacer to work with, but it crashes when trying to creat the mdx-file ...
Any ideas?
How do people compile models that they created from scratch?

at the moment, I'm pretty sure that getting a fully animated alien-head on a human-body CAN be done indeed.
I used the node-deleting method with a text editor on the ascii-mdl file of a weequay head. I'm still having some trouble getting everything into the correct position in gmax afterwards, but I'm pretty sure that can be done.
I'm sure that it is possible somehow, it's just that it's a LOT of hard work mixed with guessing. Because of that, no one's actually done it yet. Keep trying, I hope you're the first, and that more people (like me) will learn from that success.

the big problem I have now, is that if I use Taina's Replacer to compile the model, it re-adds the whole body-model back in (just as it did when I deleted the body-parts directly in Gmax).
all Taina's does is basically take the original mdl (with all the bones etc) and text edit the coordinates of the verticies or uv nodes. That means that everything that existed in the original mdl will still exist in the new one, but in a slightly different location. Anything that you've deleted or added will get ignored (or cause crazy things to happen).

If I compile the head with mdlops, it works fine and I have a Weequay head to start the game, but as is well known, when head-models are compiled with mdlops, they're bumping around wildly instead of sticking to the neck.
That's why you have to play the hex edit guessing game that Miro42's tutorial shows. Even then, you might get the head to show up in the correct position (relative to the body's neck), but the animations might be lost. This is what usually happens to my modded heads. I've only had success once out of dozens of attempts. You might need to do some bone weighting (see the tutorial section for Kha's or Jolly Boots' threads).

I tried using another head-model instead of the original weequay model for Taina's Replacer to work with, but it crashes when trying to creat the mdx-file ...
Any ideas?
That'll never work, unless the two heads have exactly the same number of verticies, and they're listed in exactly the same order. All Taina's tool does (at it's core) is compare two text files, and replace some coordinate text into the original model.

How do people compile models that they created from scratch?

I don't think any one has, for heads anyway.