Good tips here. Just one question, instead of moving the vertex close and welding them, can we just use the target weld function? It does both things on one step. I'm not sure if it has disadvenajes though.
I just prefer to do that because if I mess up, the vertices are still not welded, so I can fix them without having to ctrl+z or reload an old save. It's also easier to toggle the Snap on and off with S than toggling Target Weld with the button on the sidebar. And when you Weld them all at once, you can see directly how many polygons you saved, while Target Weld will reduce the number of polygons after every single weld.
Modeling for a film is very different from modeling for a video game. Games are rendered live as the player moves, while films are pre-rendered. Depending on which engine and on which console you're working on, your video game oriented model will have to save on polygon count.
When you're importing a model from another game into Brawl, sometimes it's going to have too many polygons for the Wii to handle. Even some models from Wii games will have trouble on Brawl because the games are using different engines.
If you modeled your character yourself, you might still have this problem because you put too much detail in your clothes or face for example.
The solution: optimization.
Mario's Brawl model (including the FLUDD) is 6207 polygons, so try to stay around 6k polys.
BEFORE STARTING
I'll start with Flygon's Oak model (click on the thumbnails to see them bigger)
Check the polycount So first of, you need to check if your character needs optimization.
You can check that by pressing 7: Look at the "Polys" line. That's nearly 3 times as many polygons as the suggested 6k.
Now you want to know where the polycount went wrong. Press F4. The model clearly has too many polygons on the head and foot. Look at the amount of polygons there are on the legs, that's just enough to be believable in-game. That's what you're aiming for.
Keeping your rig [optional/situational] If you've already rigged and you don't want to lose your rig while optimizing, you have do this:
To keep your rig while optimizing, make sure your model is in T-stance (not one foot in the air or something) then click on the Skin modifier, and scroll down to the Advanced Parameters: and uncheck Always Deform
Collapsing the model [optional/situational] If your model isn’t one big mesh, you'll have to make sure that there’s no modifiers left except Skin.
PREPARING THE MODEL
Turning into an Editable Poly The way I optimize you have to be in Editable Poly mode, not in Editable Mesh. Open the Spoiler if it's an Editable Mesh.
If you haven't rigged yet, good, it's super easy. Right click on Editable Mesh and select this: Done!
If you've already rigged, you'll have the Skin modifier so you can't do that. Make sure "Always deform" is unchecked, like I said before. Then do this:
Merging useless vertices Sometimes it's because you didn't notice, sometimes it's because the model imported smoothing groups in an odd way, but you might have hundreds of polygons that add nothing to the model but weight.
For example, those vertices should move together, but for some reason you can move them separately.
To fix this, follow these steps. Do this even if you don't see anything wrong with your model. Click on Editable Poly and click Yes if a window pops up. Then this:
MANUALLY OPTIMIZING THE MODEL
Why not ProOptimizer? When I say manually, I mean we're not going to use the ProOptimizer thingy. That's the lazy way out and it's risky because you barely have any control on how it optimizes your model.
However, if you had trouble using ProOptimizer before, try using it now that you've done all the steps above. I guess it's better than nothing.
For example, the sandal on the left is the one I've optimized using ProOptimizer. On the right is the high-poly one. It went from 578 polys to 148 polys, but look at how uneven the faces are. If this is ugly right now, imagine how it will be when rigged and animated.
Snapping vertices When you're optimizing a model, you're merging vertices with eachother to make less polygons.
To start moving the vertices around, you need to activate snapping by pressing S on the keyboard or by clicking this:
Then you need to figure out which vertices you're going to get rid of. Let's start with these edges.
To do that, you'll drag and drop a vertex you want to get rid of onto the closest vertex you want to keep.
I did that for the sandal. Half of the vertical lines are gone now, but the shading is all weird. That's because they're not welded yet. The polycount hasn't decreased yet.
Weld the vertices like we did before. That fixed the shading and we got rid of 102 polygons.
Now let's do the same for horizontal lines. After welding we got rid of 134 more polygons.
Finishing the optimization
Once you have a reasonable polygon count, you'll have to do some final steps before exporting.
First, go out of vertex mode:
If your model was already rigged, Go back in the Skin modifier and check Always Deform
If the texture is a little bit distorted, you can try to fix the UV with an Unwrap UVW modifier.
TIPS
Alt+X to make the model transparent. Useful to see if some faces could be deleted because you'll never see them. Right click > Hide selection. If your model is separated into a few sub-models, you can hide the ones that get in the way. Undo that with Right click > Unhide all. If you want advanced techniques on how to optimize a model, look up Valve's LOD tutorial.
CONCLUSION
I've only optimized one sandal but you get the idea. If you do that for the whole model, you'll have under 6k polygons and your model will work in Brawl. This technique will keep your smoothing groups, texture coordinates, and rigs. It's long and annoying but in the end the results are worth it.
mkay I guess Flygon if your rig is done you could send me the model so that I use it for my tutorial, if you want (send it by PM). I'll make it this weekend.
I meant manually. As in manually merging vertexes to lower the polycount. Pro Optimizer is the lazy and buggy way out, and there's a limit before it screws up everything.
Also I don't understand the way he keeps his rig, it seems to be entirely by accident, because that's not the best way to do it.
i will rig it before you trying to make blinking and all the brawlbox work if i was you cuz you anyway have to redo all the brawlbox work after you have rigged it and import the .dae again with the rigged model
Also I guess I could change that later but is it better to make his face one object with flipped UVs, or 2 separate mirrored objects? I've read that it's only necessary to have separate eyes if you want moving irises.
ugh this was a pain in the ass to place into T-stance. I don't get why LoL models aren't in T-stance in the first place. On left is how it was when I imported it. On right is how it is right now (placed for Pikachu bones)
in-game (not rigged yet)
Before rigging it I'm trying to make the eyes blink and change textures using PAT0...
I told ShadowWolf that making a new thread would be simpler than cleaning the old one.
So yeah, read what's in red, he pretty much summed it up.
Just keep in mind that this isn't a chatroom, so no one word post and try to only post when you have something to contribute or have something constructive to say.
When selecting characters, not even half a second after I select Pokemon Trainer, the game freezes. Every time.
I tried desactivating Gecko hacks but I still get the freeze. I used my own Brawl disc + Gecko hacks and it works fine. So I'm basically only trying to make it work using the Configurable USB Loader.
When I select Brawl in the USB Loader, I get this note: "NOTE: You are using CIOS249 rev 14: It has known problems with dual layer games. It is highly recommended that you use a different IOS or revision for installation/playback of this game." I tried 250, still got the bug. I installed and tried 222, still got the bug.
Maybe the iso is the problem? Or is there a cIOS I haven't tried that would work better?
edit: I loaded the iso in Dolphin, and Pokemon Trainer freezes there too. So it's definitely the iso that has something wrong. Does anyone know what could cause an iso to freeze like that? I'll try using WiiScrubber and replace the pac and pcs until it doesn't freeze...
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