I need help making refitted outfit mods! Can't find any good tutorials anywhere...

[afro-herbalist]

I'm wanted to break into DOA5 modding and I've been trying to make my own version of HongChinas Honoka HLOD Refits (for different characters). His/her mod takes "stock/built-in" outfits and refits them to the juicy AF HLOD body and it was one of my fave mods. However I quickly found out that theres a real lack of clearly written, easy to understand tutorials on the subject. I've searched for hours and days and found nothing except 1 tutorial that showed us only how to extract the outfits from DOA5 and import them into Blender with a plugin, then back into the game but I need a more specific and detailed tutorial for what I'm trying to do, and its already been done so the knowledge must be out there somewhere right?

 

Heres all the steps and things I've done so far:-

 

1. Extracted the outfits I want

2. Imported them into Blender

2b. Imported the UHLOD into Blender, directly ontop of the outfit mesh so everything sits at "0,0,0" centered space.

3. Fixed multiple broken mesh parts (most DOA5 outfit meshes have "double verts" and "broken, unconnected verts")

4. Hid the "original body" which comes packed with every outfit" so only the clothes are visible

5. Made the HLOD body transparent and unselectable so I can edit the outfit around it easier

6. Used "proportional editing" and "X-Mirror/Symmetrical Editing" to morph the outfit to fit the UHLOD body (I'm learning!!!)

7. Gave up because I haven't even got the FOGGIEST idea if I'm doing things right or wrong. I don't want to blindly continue just to find out I wasted all my time because of some huge mistake I made earlier!

 

 

Heres some questions I REALLY need answers to so I can get back to making the mod:-

 

1. All of the outfits I've imported into Blender have "broken areas" like I said; so, if I go in and repair them, will it cause the game engine to get confused and crash the game because the amount of verts/edges/faces is now different??? If I don't fix these breaks, then it feels almost impossible to edit the outfits but I want to know if I've wasted my time by fixing them or if I'm on the right track.

 

2. What do I need to import and what can I leave alone? Do I need to import every piece of a TMC file, or only the things I specifically need? Sounds like a silly question I'm sure, but I'm 100% in the dark here I need to be 100% sure what I need to be doing.

 

3. I'm trying to take "normal" outfits and make them "HLOD compatible", so when I import the outfit TMCMeshes, should I delete the "original body" mesh leaving only the clothing meshes, then morph the clothing meshes over the top of the HLOD mesh and then rename the HLOD mesh to fool the game engine into thinking the HLOD mesh is the normal mesh?

 

4. Do I need to delete any parts of the HLOD body mesh that are covered by clothing? EG, for a simple shirt and no trousers outfit, after I reshape the outfit to fit the HLOD body, do I need to delete any parts of the HLOD body that are under the shirt because you wouldn't see them anyway, or is it okay to just leave the mesh intact?

 

Huge thanks to ANYONE who can help me out!

[JQdude]

I may be wrong here but wouldnt it be easier to extract the TMC and TMCL files using "link_reshuffle" and then using "DOA5LRCharacterTransformerTool" with the user defined files HLOD from SaafRats

 

most tools are here http://w11.zetaboards.com/SFxT_Mods/forum/4220224/

[LGMODS]

1. If you have broken outfits and you want to repair them by filling them or whatever, be sure to have the weight paint that is correct on this spot too.

Whatever the number or vertices, faces or edges, doa don't have limit on that (fortunately or high poly models won't exist).

Same as the number of meshes included in one TMC, the only limit is the file size that is different for every characters it can go from ~7mb to 15mb, you'll quickly notice if you file is too much big in game you'll have infinite loading where you'll have to reduce textures size.

 

2. No you don't need to import every pieces of meshes except if you want to edit them all. But if you want a complete view during your work it's prefered to work with all meshes, it's only up to you.

 

3 & 4. Adapting outfits to HLOD require manual edit in Blender. There are no magic tool that will automatically fit an outfit on a nude body.

This is up to you if you want to keep the full body under the outfit but be aware of clipping in certain case, if you want to avoid clipping for any reasons it's recommended to cut the parts that you don't need (example legs under stockings).

 

 

[afro-herbalist]

Thanks for the replies both of ya.

 

Okay thats cool so I'll try to remove any hidden parts of the body where it might clip through the clothes. I take it "proportional editing" is the best way to edit soft curvy stuff like bodies and outfits? Thats what I've been using and it makes everything nice and smooth (I'll need to figure out a way to make it completely smooth later, but for now the basic shape is there, it just needs ironing lol!), I got one of Momijis bras to fit roughly over 2 UHLOD watermelons so far (hell yea!) but thats where I had to take a break.

 

Oh man, I'm glad its safe to repair the meshes! I've fixed the "broken" areas in 2 outfits so far (what I did was find areas that had "double verts" then choose "remove doubles", and sometimes I had to "join" 2 verts together with an edge because when I pull on Momijis bra with "proportional edit" mode, it looks like some parts are ripping apart because some verts aren't connected to eachother), but after I fixed them they're a lot easier for me to edit. I'll have to check out some tutorials on weight painting in Blender because I've never done that before but I've got this far so I'm gonna keep going. How would I know if the "weight" is right or wrong in those areas, will it be obvious or would I need to find out the weight properties of the original costume first? I noticed this thread on Zetaboards about "transferring weights" [ http://w11.zetaboards.com/SFxT_Mods/topic/8324348/1/ ] but I can't tell if this applies to what I'm trying to do or not lol.

 

Anyway thanks again for the explanations, finally things are a bit less confusing now!

[LGMODS]

Proportional editing is a great way to make edits yes, but sometime you'll still have to manually move vertices yourself to reach what you want exactly.

 

About weight painting, yes I recommend you to watch some tutorial if you never touched that but in short you can go in Weight Mode in Blender and click on a vertex group on the right side to check every group and weight paint assigned.

The transfer weight method is good to quickly assign weight paint over the meshes but in some case you'll have to fix it manually, more accurate this is and more smooth it will look in game.

 

Good luck