UV Data Lost on Export!

[yoshi]

Ok, after I figured out my last problems with the cal3D exporter, I quickly ran into another.  I'm actually doing texturing in a separate program, Ultimate Unwrap 3d, exporting it as a .OBJ, and importing that into blender.  This works remarkably well, and the model is nicely textured and ready to be rigged, which I do in blender.

However, after much failure, I realized that the cal3d exporter script doesn't seem to be exporting UV information (either correctly or at all), so the texture gets mapped onto the model all wrong.  I'm pretty sure I'm doing things right, because I don't get any errors when I export my model.  This doesn't seem to be a problem for author of the tutorial on using blender to export cal3d models.. so I'm baffled as to why it's a problem for me.  

Thanks in advance.

[dingobloo]

not a support question for CS as such, ive never heard of it happen, if you do find out whats going on please tell us.

[yoshi]

Ok, I figured out that the texture was being flipped.  In my .cal3d file, I tried putting

Code:

<options rotate_x_axis="yes" flip_textures="no" />

but that didn't help.  I changed flip_textures to "yes" but it didn't change anything at all (so I'm thinking that maybe my CS build is outdated or something, even though I'm using the CVS version).  Finally, I tried manually flipping the textures in photoshop, and that worked.  So the problem was that my texture was being flipped.

...but now I don't understand why viewmesh.exe isn't respecting the flip_textures attribute in my cal3d file.

[deckerego]

Are you importing the OBJ into Blender, or just the UV map?

You might want to check your normals... and also try re-normalizing the mesh in blender. Some vertexes might be out of order...

[yoshi]

Hi deckerego, thanks for responding.

I am importing the entire obj into blender.  I'm pretty new to blender so I don't exactly know how to check the normals/re-normalize them.  I toggled the show normals button and looked to see if I could find any that were not pointing outward, but I didn't find any.

At this point, though, I'm more concerned about my viewmesh.exe not recognizing my flip_textures setting.  Unless it is... and something else is going wrong... or something.

[deckerego]

I'm wondering if it is a symptom of something else... that's why I wondered if renormalizing might help. Sometimes this can happen if normals aren't correct or vertexes are rendered out-of-order... weird stuff can happen then.

Did you start building your model with Blender and covert it back/forth as an OBJ?

[yoshi]

Actually, I did the modeling in gmax, then I exported it as an md3, textured it in that other program (Ultimate Unwrap 3D), exported it from UU3D as an obj, and finally imported it into Blender.

[deckerego]

I'm wondering if all that exportin' and importin' somehow skewed the mesh data along the way... hard to really tell...

I'm guessing renormalizing is a good place to start... you might also do a "remove duplicates" on the entire mesh to ensure all your faces are continuous. Other than that, I'm not sure...

[yoshi]

Alright.. thanks for the tip.

By the way... what does it mean exactly to "renormalize" a mesh and how would one go about doing such a thing?

edit: also, I looked around the CS documentation for the possible tags/attributes of a cal3d model file.  However, I could only find the one example they have for the cally model.  Is there anywhere that has what I am looking for?

[deckerego]

Lemme take a look at the Blender documentation really quick...

Looks like CTRL+N will recalculate the normals so they point all "outside."

The Cal3d XML file doesn't really have documentation right now... it's considered to be "self-documenting" for better or worse The example at plugins/mesh/sprcal3d/persist/dwarf.cal3d is supposed to maintain a list of all the parameters a cal3d XML file can have methinks.