Gonna use the thread again to showcase something important xD
You character importers should know about the metal textures. They're something to be added to the imported character once it's in brawlbox, and ready to go, so when that character gets a metal box, it gets metallic, just like standard characters.
Some of you (like me) have enabled manually some fake metal textures by changing some values in the extra materials you manually added and such. Some of you have never tried to include metal textures to your characters. Blackjax96 implemented some button in brawlbox 0.65b beta in order to automate this. Some people reported this to cause model glitches, explosions or whatever.
I personally didn't test this feature until a few days ago, just cause I didn't know where it was. So, the first step is knowing it. Here's the feature:
Now, if it makes models explode and such, why telling you this?
Well, just because the 'model exploding' isn't random. It happens under some conditions.
I'll explain. Blackjax is a very clever guy, and when the importer was released, it automatically wrote the UV, normal and vertex values in a format or another, depending of the values themselves, in order to save space. This means that big models can fit the brawl because some values can be written shortly, resulting in a smaller file. Anyway, he programmed that 'please wait' thing in 0.65b beta and 0.65b. I bet many of you just ignore it, and you should know more about it.
These are important:
What do they mean? Instead of looking for the shorter possible format for the values, the UV, normals and vertices are forced to be in the 'float' format.
Well, Blackjax96 said that the automatic metal materials feature did work well in some brawl models he tested, but people reported those exploding issues that made him remove the feature in 0.65b. So the model has to be from brawl or something?
Well, I suppose that you know what I mean at this point:
IF YOU FORCE THE FLOAT FORMAT FOR UV, NORMALS AND VERTICES, THE AUTOMATIC METAL MATERIAL FEATURE WORKS FLAWLESSLY.
This sentence is exactly as is. If any of them isn't forced, the model will have issues, in vertices, in normals, or in UVs. It may be fixed from now on, now that this fact is known, but in the meanwhile, this is the solution.
Also, if you force floats, the coordinates will be more exact for sure. If some values was, for example, 1.6321 in 3dsmax, not forcing float values may result in having 1.63 in brawlbox, losing the 0.0021. If two vertices that are supposed to be in the same place, but from different objects, lose precission like this, they may get separated and a small hole would appear in the character. So, unless forcing results in a too big file, I highly recommend to use those boxes before importing.
Well, with this said... Get your imports and fix your metal materials nao!! xD
