[Solved] Cannot get "gate node" model to work

[MrChoke]

I have been having major trouble doing what I would think is a simple model change. Granted I am totally new to 3D modeling. I want to change the "castle_secret_door" model so that it does not have that extra faces near at the top of the model. These faces are a perfect fit as an overlay to a ceiling, but what if I don't want a castle ceiling above it? Then it sticks out like a sore thumb and looks awful. And this not the only castle-based model with these faces at the top. I'd like to do this change for many of them, if I can get it to work.

So in Blender, I tried two approaches to get rid of these faces (there is one face on each side). I tried deleting them and then I tried doing Z-axis transform of the top edge to reduce the areas of the face to almost nothing. After this, I exported as OBJ, loaded it in GMT, did those re-calc calls, and saved as a model.

Here is what I get in game if I use the model no matter what I have tried to get it to work:
"Warning: gate node is not found for castle_secret_door2"

This is not true. I see in Blender a "frame" and a "gate" node for this model. I know it has a gate because it is Door component and I want to make this change to a Door component. I did not touch the gate. The faces I modified/deleted are part of the frame. Why is the game saying this?????

ALSO, what renders as the model is a completely garbled distorted mess. Why did moving 2 faces destroy the rendering of the entire model?????

ANY help here would be great.

[minmay]

Have you tried the direct Blender exporter? It doesn't support rigged animations but might fix your problems here.

[MrChoke]

Have you tried the direct Blender exporter? It doesn't support rigged animations but might fix your problems here.

Hi. I do have version 1.4.3 of bitcpy's script if that is what you mean. In Blender I choose "Import Legend of Grimrock 2 model" to pull it form the .dat file. Is there another way to what you are saying?

EDIT:
Doh, there is a Grimrock model export option in Blender, not just import. That must be what you mean. I will give it a try. So this means no GMT??? Hmmm......

[MrChoke]

Minmay, its better! The rendering mess of the textures is gone now. Yay! However, I still get the "no gate node" warning.

I never saw the export option in Blender itself. Now in GMT, I can open the model directly and it shows each node. More things to see and change now. Slug's tutorial showed us to export as an OBJ. Now I wonder when we need to do that versus export...

UPDATE:
Solved!! All I had to do was recalculate the normal and tangents in GMT. Error is gone. Thanks again. This stuff is getting easier....

[minmay]

Minmay, its better! The rendering mess of the textures is gone now. Yay! However, I still get the "no gate node" warning.

In case you're still interested in using bitcpy's exporter the object hierarchy in the scene overview (top right corner by default) should look like this:

The game_matrix object is a "dummy" object that rotates its children automatically on export so that the Blender axes correspond to the Grimrock axes; it won't actually be written into the .model.
Everything except that game_matrix and RootNode itself should be a child of RootNode.

Also if the lighting is wrong on your model, especially if you created it from scratch instead of from an imported model, try "inverting" it by scaling all axes by -1 and flipping normals.

[MrChoke]

Now that I have a bit of success with changing models I am getting more interested. So far I have delete faces of quite a few models to fit what I want to do. As far as adding faces and even more scary, creating models from scratch, I am a long way from that.

One thing in particular that I do not understand is the interaction between a model and the materials. I know that the material itself is just a name reference in the model, I get that. But where to do we see in Blender which material a face is going to be painted with? And also, how is it specified as to which part of the material file will be used as the source for the painting? The material file is just a .TGA image so somehow an area of it must be specified for painting to the face. I cannot seem to find any of this in Blender.

[minmay]

One thing in particular that I do not understand is the interaction between a model and the materials. I know that the material itself is just a name reference in the model, I get that. But where to do we see in Blender which material a face is going to be painted with?

In the Properties view (below the aforementioned scene overview by default), click on the checkered sphere at the top and you can see a list of all the material slots for the object. In edit mode, you can select a material in the list and click on "Assign" to assign it to all selected geometry, "Select" to select all geometry with that material, and "Deselect" to deselect all geometry with that material.

And also, how is it specified as to which part of the material file will be used as the source for the painting? The material file is just a .TGA image so somehow an area of it must be specified for painting to the face. I cannot seem to find any of this in Blender.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2 ... Unwrapping

[MrChoke]

Thanks. I sort of see how to do it now. Didn't know about the UV editor. Seems like the grid of the left would be the position on the material file then? I'll read up on it some more when I can.

[bitcpy]

Have you tried the direct Blender exporter? It doesn't support rigged animations but might fix your problems here.

The exporter should handle both animated armatures and object nodes.
I tried animating the models/env/beach_button from the container and exported it as a LoG1 animation to test it in GMT which worked fine.

Just wanted to let you know

[minmay]

Yeah I was wrong about that, sorry.