Invisible Unit Attachments

[*Helios*]

Hey all,

I've been trying to merge the Dragonslayers' model from TATW with the Irondrakes' attachments from COW: BOTET (for personal use, of course). Although everything looks fine in milkshape, the added attachments don't appear in-game (the actual Dragonslayer models appear fine). The battlemodels.modeldb should be good.

I saw the earlier thread about shields not appearing and the UV mapping, but as I've taken these models from existing mods (in which they work fine), I'm not sure if UV mapping problems apply. Also, I loaded the milkshape models directly from the .dds files, so there shouldn't be any conflict there. How can I get the attachments to appear?
irondrakes.zip

[Gigantus]

Invalid attachment\group comments? Compare the original comments with the current comments.

[*Helios*]

If I'm understanding you, the comments should be the same for the attachments groups. (Like primaryactive0, secondaryactive0, etc.). The third line is 0 for all of the attachments (Not sure if this is what's causing the problem).

[paleologos]

Try this.
irondrakes_1_lod0.7z

[*Helios*]

Thanks for the reply!

I tried out the .mesh, but that just netted me some weird models:

Not sure on what to do now (Also curious on what you tried, glancing at your .ms3d)?

[paleologos]

Ok, that was not supposed to happen, I'm taking another look and I think I will have to change more stuff.

[paleologos]

This is my second go at it, let me know if it works.
irondrakes_2_lod0.7z

[*Helios*]

Thanks again for your continued effort!

It kinda worked this time! The primary and secondary weapons all appear. Maybe I'm nitpicky, but the backpack/flask attachments still don't actually appear in battle. Is there a workaround to this? I might be able to do some lifting too if I'm taking up too much of your time.

[paleologos]

If this one does not work I don't know what else to do.
I'm guessing the weapons the backpacks and the flasks are the parts that you used GOAT to attach to the rest of the model.
GOAT often loses vertex bone weighting of the parts that are merged to an already existing model but this strangely does show in milkshape.
So the parts of the model seem ready to respond to the animations but they are somehow hidden because they are not responding.
If anything else seems to be missing, just reassign it's vertices to the appropriate bone.

irondrakes_3_lod0.7z

[*Helios*]

Wow! You've actually gone and done it!

If it isn't asking too much, what did I have to tweak to get them to work?


Meanwhile, in all their fully non-invisible armed glory:

[*Helios*]

Ah, nevermind, I see your response above.

Wow! You've actually gone and done it!

If it isn't asking too much, what did I have to tweak to get them to work?


Meanwhile, in all their fully non-invisible armed glory:

[paleologos]

Glad to have helped.
By the way, care for a thumbnail?

Just convert it to *.tga and drop it in the appropriate UI folder.

[Dolen]

Btw, it seems that the number in the third line in the comment section determines whether a model of the same type (determined in the first line e.g. "head") always appears in game. For example, if you set the number to "0", a model that belongs to, let's say " head", always appears in game, but if you set it to "1", sometimes the model doesn't show up (occasional headless models in this case).