New toy - EQ model viewer

[Kaiyodo]

I've just put the first version of my model viewer up on the web. http://www.geocities.com/kaiyodouk/ . Might help people who are looking for graphics for weapons and stuff.

I'll post a section of the readme save me typing what it does and doesn't do again

Kaiyodo's EQ Model Viewer :-

What it does:

Lets you view a lot of the EQ models in wireframe or textured. You can export them as Wavefront OBJ files too so you can play with them in 3dsMax!

How to use it:

1) Load it up and set your EQ directory so it can find the files. When it's found the EQ files the list on the left will fill up and it should Auto-select gequip.s3d
2) Press 'Load S3D'. It won't take long, when it's finished it'll say 'Done' at the bottom and auto-select the first file in the model list.
3) Press 'Load Model'. It'll say 'Loading WLD' for a bit then You'll get a screenful of crap, click on one of the names in the box at the bottom to view a single model rather then everything in the file.
4) Rotate about it a bit in the 3d view, left mouse button = rotate, right = pan, middle = zoom.

Thing that will go wrong:

1) Loading in zone S3Ds may take a while (30 secs or so, there are 1 million+ chunks to check in some of those files!), if they're Luclin zones they'll just crash. This is a model viewer, not a zone viewer, what did you expect
2) Some stuff won't have textures on.
3) Models that animate using skinning will screw up.

There's more info in the readme, but that should be enough to get people going

K.

[Ariak]

Wow.

[Locoelf]

First off! Incredible!

Second off...Why is it there are tons of weapons and such that we dont have in the item visuals section?

Who wants to be the first to load all those in there?

[Shawn319]

Notice the weapon/item viewing if you load up the gequip.s3d files? hint: use the Only show selection box and turn off wire frame.

Yeah i guess you did =P very nice tool. great stuff to look at.

[Beers218]

Expect something in the lines of a cheap game by me including these models :p


Maybe...

[Q-Dog]

Another beautiful thing is that it gives the the Item numbers and he has his custom item editor so you look at any weapon you want, find the IT number and Pop it in your DB with his editor and BAM there you have it. Kaiyodo: I indeed tip my hat to you, and thank you for your hard work and effort.

[Lurker_005]

Sweet!

Some comments...

It will actually view the chr files as well. good for finding out what models and heads ect are avaliable in a zone. It will not display them right yet though, and it lists it by nameed codes not number. It does not assemble the parts to the models right, They are located on top of each other :( Is there an xyz (perhaps uvw too) offset that your not using?

I was also able to display zone obj files

Obvious things that would rock if they were fixed:
Texture transparancy
animated textures
Textures not displaying (related to 1st 2?)
Sub objects not assembled correctly

[Kaiyodo]

The reason all of the characters model parts are on top of each other (I'm guessing) is releated to me not using the animation info. I assume that they're using skinned and boned models so each model part's position is governed by the skeletal information. This info is probably in the MESHOPS or TRACKDEF sections somewhere (you can see these in SPK files), but I haven't been able to figure out what the data means.

The different parts of the models do have an xyz offset, I didn't miss it, it's just zero all the time for non-zone models. Even when the offset is applied to zone models it didn't turn out correctly. Zoneconverter manages to put the zone geometry in the right place, but reading through that code makes my head hurt

Regarding transparency and animated textures, I've not even looked at the MDF (Material defenition file) files, which is where that info would be kept. I discovered quite early on that the MDF filename was the almost same as the texturemap it contains (CUB0000_MDF uses CUB0000.bmp) so I cheated and assumed that What I really should do is open up CUB0000_MDF and pull the material data from there. Texture transparency should be quite straight forward, I could probably put in a toggle for that so you could do it manually.

I found another reason for textures not displaying too, I can only pull textures out of the current S3D file that you're viewing. Some models, and I think all the zones do this, have their textures in another file. It had been puzzling me that some textures dissappeared when I switched over to using the S3D files rather than disk files, looks like that was why.

K.

[wurmslayer2k]

/shrug. Not auto-selecting my gequips :(.

[Kaiyodo]

/shrug. Not auto-selecting my gequips :(

Bah. I've no idea how that could fail unless it's not finding the EQ files. Looks like you'll just have to click on it everytime :(

K.

[wurmslayer2k]

I meant that its not even showing gequip is there. It shows all the zones but when i press load s3d it does nothing. Yes its set at the right directory....

[Hmm]

wow it works great!

just load s3d, then load wld file then click on one of list. dont try to open certain zones ( think its load, and kurnak zones )

[Bardboy]

Is there a way to import your own graphics? would it require recompiling the files? How would that work? Can any of the file formats you export be read in 3dmax or some other 3d modeling software? (dont have 3dmax installed atm)

[killspree]

Once you click load s3d, click the load model button near the top right. That will then load all the specific models of the file then you can click on in the bottom right box.

Btw this is an amazing tool, great work!

[Kaiyodo]

I meant that its not even showing gequip is there. It shows all the zones but when i press load s3d it does nothing. Yes its set at the right directory....

The only reason I can think that gequip.s3d wouldn't appear is that the file isn't in your EQ directory. If that was the case though, EQ would never run. I just search for all S3D files in the EQ directory to fill in that list, nothing special.

Is there a way to import your own graphics? would it require recompiling the files? How would that work? Can any of the file formats you export be read in 3dmax or some other 3d modeling software? (dont have 3dmax installed atm)

Importing graphics isn't possible, not all of the file format is understood so it's currently impossible to create a valid model file that EQ would read. You can certainly import the object format I save out into 3DSMAX. By default Max can't import wavefront OBJ files but you can download a free importer for those off the 'net (don't have a link around unfortunately).

K.