"Catsuit" Vanquisher Mesh (Armors Being Re-worked)

[Phanjam]

I found a modified mesh for the Vanquisher on another forum that changes the Vanquisher silhouette to what is essentially a catsuit (no skirt and no hanging cape at the back).

The mod maker's name is "Demolos" and I asked him for permission to share his mesh outside of its original forum and with the wider torchlight modders community. My intention was to share the mesh specifically with artists making TL armor textures, because I thought they could get really creative with a mesh that did not have a skirt/cape! With a mesh like that, you can put jeans on your vanquisher, or even shorts a-la Lara Croft!

Anyway, Demolos very graciously agreed! So here is the download link to the .rar file containing just the modified vanquisher.MESH file.

Demolos_Capeless_Vanq_Mesh_Only.rar

Here are some screenshots (I hid her behind some cave walls and used TorchCam to zoom in enough).







Artists may find the mesh picks up textures differently than the way the standard vanquisher mesh does, specially where the skirt/cape vertices have been re-worked. I'm not a 3D modeller so I can't help you resolve issues like that, but I will try to invite Demolos into this forum so that he can answer questions.

I hope a lot of artists end up making a lot of new outfit textures for this mesh! Enjoy!

[Phanjam]

Update

26 July 2010: Demolos also kindly made available this wireframe image of his mesh.



Will try to get higher resolution versions as well

[Tuishimi]

I think this is a great idea/alternative! Now if only I had skills in creating armor images...

I would like to see what some of the talented people in these forums could do with this!

[Tuishimi]

How bad do the existing armors look on this mesh?

[Phanjam]

How bad do the existing armors look on this mesh?

y'know, I never tried that! Will do it a bit later though, am headed out for now

[Phanjam]

Okay! Coming from Tuishimi's question about what the standard armor skins look like on this new mesh (thanks Tuishimi ) - in summary (so far) the armors render properly for the most part on Demolos' mesh.

UPDATE (Aug.2,2010)
I removed the pics basically because they showed what the wardrobe meshes were rendering (which is basically just the default look), and not what Demolos' mesh looked like with the armors. And they took up so-o-o-o-o much space too ...

[Tuishimi]

Thanks! I was surprised the capes didn't cause problems.

[Phanjam]

There's a whole bunch of other .mesh files in the wardrobe folder. I think those are what govern the rendering when the model puts on this or that armor.
Hmmm, making armors for this may not be just a texture job after all ! I'm guessing you'd need to work with only the "starting set" wardrobe mesh (since it was the only one that didn't render the skirt and cape). But there'd be a whole lot of other files that'd need to be tweaked too... Gonna give this some more thought / experimentation...

[Dusho]

yep
there are 12 different wardrobe meshes you need to adjust if you want to e.g. remove the cape for every armor
did that for my lady knight class, but just adjusted the cape
I removed the cape only for new wardrobe (light leather)

you can take that mesh from lady knight mod and play with it - it's called vanquisher_light.mesh also with matching textures (are listed in vanquisher_light.material)

[SorrySoldOut]

I'm going to download the mesh this weekend and see what I can come up with, if anything. I never really messed around with mesh files or armor sets before.

[Tuishimi]

yep
there are 12 different wardrobe meshes you need to adjust if you want to e.g. remove the cape for every armor
did that for my lady knight class, but just adjusted the cape
I removed the cape only for new wardrobe (light leather)

you can take that mesh from lady knight mod and play with it - it's called vanquisher_light.mesh also with matching textures (are listed in vanquisher_light.material)

Which reminds me... with multi-class mods I can't seem to get your light leather. I think I must have to get in and edit every item file to make it work as you meant it.

[Phanjam]

yep
there are 12 different wardrobe meshes you need to adjust if you want to e.g. remove the cape for every armor
did that for my lady knight class, but just adjusted the cape
I removed the cape only for new wardrobe (light leather) you can take that mesh from lady knight mod and play with it - it's called vanquisher_light.mesh also with matching textures (are listed in vanquisher_light.material)

Hi Dusho. Thanks for allowing others to use your vanquisher_light mesh! One thing I'd like to check right away is to compare how my test textures work on your's and Demolos' meshes.

I'm going to download the mesh this weekend and see what I can come up with, if anything. I never really messed around with mesh files or armor sets before.

Hi SorrySoldOut. Have fun playing with the meshes and please post if you can about any learnings you come up with!

[SorrySoldOut]

K so far by playing with the base mesh and textures I figured out why your probably getting that bit of texture error on the arms. So far as I can see the cat suit mesh uv's might not be exactly lined up with the original uv's which is producing the error on the arm. I'll do more messing around to be sure but that seems to be the reason why, everything needs to be exactly the same uv wise (even if there is no skirt).

[Phanjam]

Hi SorrySoldOut & thanks for that info! Just to add to the body of knowlege...
I tried making a simple bikini outfit to test how the mesh would handle it. It seems around the lower abdomen, the way it picks up textures is really misaligned, like this...



Does that give anyone any ideas about (a) how to fix the mesh or (b) how to make textures for this mesh? Thanks!

P.S. A really dumb question - what's "UV"?

[SorrySoldOut]

P.S. A really dumb question - what's "UV"?

Nah not a dumb question, its basically just the layout for how the textures are applied to the 3d model.

[Phanjam]

Okay this is going to be a series of posts of whatever I find out from trying different things. I won't really attempt to relate all the posts to each other - let's just treat this as a storehouse of trial-and-error findings .

Learning #1
In connection with trying to get this mesh to work with the armor sets, I did the following:
1) copied the lines of the "chest" submesh from Demolos' mesh, and grafted them on to the armor-set wardrobe meshes (in place of their original "chest" submesh lines), and
2) modified the .png "chest" texture files of each of the armor-sets to remove their cape portions.

This has very mixed results as follows:



The nicest render (and safest ) is for the heavy plate chest. Chain is pretty good too. Next I'm going to try the same thing but with different meshes.

We have 3 meshes to play with actually... Demolos has 2 and Dusho has allowed us to experiment with his 1 cape-less mesh (from his Lady Knight mod).

The above results are from using Demolos' second mesh (the one you can download from the link in the OP) which, as far as I can tell, differs from his first version via an improved UV map and added vertices for actual nipples.

Note to self: provide download links for the other meshes

I don't expect much difference using Demolos' first mesh (but who knows), but I'm very curious to see how this works with the chest submesh from Dusho's mesh

[Phanjam]

...I removed the cape only for new wardrobe (light leather)

you can take that mesh from lady knight mod and play with it - it's called vanquisher_light.mesh also with matching textures (are listed in vanquisher_light.material)

Hi Dusho! Just thought I'd mention - I tried re-naming your vanquisher_light.mesh to Vanquisher.MESH and using it in the media\models\Vanquisher folder (replacing the standard Vanquisher.MESH file). But the game would crash on start-up

But I'm thinking, this mesh came from inside your wardrobe folder, so it probably wasn't meant to be used as the base mesh for the character.

Anyway my next experiments involving your mesh are limited to just the wardrobe meshes

[Phanjam]

We have 3 meshes to play with actually... Demolos has 2 and Dusho has allowed us to experiment with his 1 cape-less mesh (from his Lady Knight mod).

Note to self: provide download links for the other meshes

Okay here's the archive you can download with all 3 mesh files in it already.

[enemantik]

Sorta off-topic, but it appears that you are using the Revealing Armors mod (the more revealing version), and my (stupidish) question is: does it conflict with Vanquisher skins - mainly with those which alter only the face? I haven't tried it yet, because I have this one skin mod, "Muriel", installed; and I just won't abandon it, no matter how sweet the more revealing armors look to me.

[Phanjam]

Hi enemantik! There's no such thing as a stupid question .
On the revealing armors, are you referring to what armor-set I used for the Valkyrie II v0.1 mod, and whether the Muriel skin+hair mod will conflict with that?

Just from looking at the composition of the Muriel mod (without trying them together yet), I say there shouldn't be any conflict. BUT if what you want is to make the Valkyrie to look like Muriel, just putting the Muriel mod into your TL mods folder won't work - that'll only change the Vanquisher.

To make the Valkyrie look like Muriel do the following:
1) get into the media\models\Vanquisher folder of the Muriel mod and make a copy of the body.png file that's in there
2) paste it into the media\models\Valkyrie folder of the Valkyrie II v0.1 mod (replacing the body.png file that came with the Valkyrie II v0.1 mod). And that's it!

If you want the hair from the Muriel mod as well:
1) get into the media\wardrobe\vanquisher folder of the Muriel mod and copy all the files that're in there (3 .dds files and 6 .png files).
2) paste all of those into the media\wardrobe\VALKYRIE folder of the Valkyrie II v0.1 mod (replacing the corresponding files that came with the Valkyrie II v0.1 mod). And that's it!