Ped to player beards (and possibly other body parts)

[B Dawg 10,323]

This tutorial is here assuming you know how to use OpenIV and Openformats to single out specific meshes from the models and know how to apply them to other peds & or players, and you have 3DS Max & GIMS IV ofc.

The reason ped meshes are broken on player models are because they have a different bone set, and the weight painting ends up being applied to the wrong bones. Fortunately, this is fixable without having to manually repaint the weighting or anything similar that could potentially be tedious, so as long as you know the process, it should be easy to do.

 

I'm gonna use my mod as an example.

I first set the beard up for the ped (openformats export the IV MP model and Johnny K ped model, move the _high quality mesh file over to Johnny's folder (don't need the _med quality LOD) and copy paste the beard data into Johnny's .ODD text file).

Import said .ODD into 3DS MAX, moving & scaling the beard so it fits to Johnny's head (make sure you do this via Modify menu > Editable Mesh > select all the Vertices/Edges/Faces/Polygons/Elements (I just used Element selection in this case). For beards (or at least, the beards from the IV Multiplayer Model, don't know about the other ones) you don't have to worry about the quality of the mesh being degraded when imported as it doesn't have any smoothing groups. For meshes that do have smoothing groups and end up looking like crap when imported, you can partially restore mesh quality by doing the following:

Quote

Modify > Editable Mesh > Selection: Vertex > Select all of them > Under Edit Geometry is the Weld option, set it to the lowest possible value (which is about 0.001) and click the Selected box 

Once the moving/scaling is done, you can export it and check it out in game on the ped version of Niko/Johnny/Luis if you want to. Then comes the next step:

 

Under Modify menu > Skin > Parameters, enable Edit Envelopes, and in the Bones menu, click on each bone and see if it has any color on it or not. For every bone that does, note it down or take a screenshot, this is what I've done:

 

The names I've written onto the image (not highlighted by a blue background) are the bones of the Player that should match the bones of the Ped version. Spine3, Neck & Head are the same.

Under Advanced Parameters is the Save option. do it (you don't need any bones selected when doing so, it will save all of the bones weights).

 

Now, start a new 3DS MAX scene. Assuming you have the modified beard converted into Player format (.ODR, make sure you have the .skel file of the Player version of Niko/Johnny/Luis in the folder, which you can easily get from an OpenFormats export of any other player body part), import it into 3DS MAX.

Under Modify menu > Skin > Parameters, enable Edit Envelopes, under Select, tick the Vertices box,

Select all the vertices, and under Weight Properties, untick Normalize.

Now, click on each bone, find the matching bones and write them down similarly to what I've done in the image above.

For any bone that has weight painting (and as a result, doesn't have an Abs. value under Weight Properties), set the Abs. value to 0.0 (all bones in the end will have the value set to 0.0)

After all the weighting has been removed, under Advanced Parameters click the Load option and select your envelope file.

Now, all you have to do is make sure the positions of the Weighted Current & Incoming Envelopes/Bones match (for ones that don't have any weighting, it doesn't matter).

Under Incoming Envelopes, click the Bones whose positions that don't match and move them with the Move Up and Move Down buttons.

As a result, it should go from this:

to this

 

Click Ok, check the weight panting on the bones, and if all is well, you're done. You export, take the exported mesh file and overwrite the old one (keep the original Player .skel file), import into your playerped.rpf and check it out (if you've setup the textures for it too).

Edited July 14, 2020 by B Dawg

[B Dawg 10,323]

Important:

3DS Max has two ways to import meshes, the one on the right on the image is necessary to be able to properly transfer weights from ped to player. The one on the left via GIMS IV pop-up menu is necessary if you want the textures loaded to make it easier to adjust position & scale (which I didn't use for the 1st version of the beard because I forgot it existed lol). When you export the version you see textures with (left), you have to re-import it via the other method (right), save the envelopes and re-export that way, and then adapt it to the player.

Edited July 19, 2020 by B Dawg

[reeversky 20]

This is really cool and informative. Inspired me to mess around with some files on my game. Maybe I'll give Niko a new haircut or something. Thank you for sharing.