How to make Actor Fonts

[Fish Taco]

Could somebody possibly pull apart an actor into seperate pieces (upper arm, lower arm, torso, etc.) for me, or at least tell me how to do it? Thanks.

[Travis Wells]

1. ActorExtractor the actor you want to edit
2. Open the .3CN in pencil
3. Find the first BMDL. It should be tiny, about 48 bytes. Export it somewhere.
4. For every BMDL after that, view them.
If they are a part you want to remove, import the blank BMDL over them.

[Fish Taco]

How do I make sure each has a new id?

[Travis Wells]

You don't need to mess with IDs. ActorExtractor takes care of all the ID changes that need to be done.

(You do, however, have to do a seperator ActorExtractor expansion for each prop you want to make)

[Fish Taco]

I have to get the actor from a .vxp, so i renamed it to .zip, unzipped it, and I open the .3cn there... correct?

[Travis Wells]

erg, that's more complicated.
Much more complicated. Complicated enough that I'll explain later

[Fish Taco]

aww fuck you

russ.... aaron...?

[Fish Taco]

I am so alone, in this big dark world, they call v3dmm .

[Aaron Haynes]

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to do, which is just as much caused by tiredness/hangover/hunger than trying to derive context from your posts. IOW, do you want an actor that is just an arm, or do you want a font that has a bunch of actor pieces in it?

[Fish Taco]

Whatever Russ did with Smash, and whatever you did with Dask for that one test photo where he is leaning over and the wind blows his hair... so I guess the font.

[Aaron Haynes]

Extract all of the necessary BMDLs (arm pieces, leg pieces, head, hair, there should be about 10-20 depending on the character). Also extract the TMAPs that go along with each one. For stuff like hands, you may need to make a seperate skin texture, because of the way they're normally set up.

Use 7gen to make individual textures out of each of the TMAPs.

Now, make a copy of Superdings or some other existing 3D font. Go through the .3cn and replace the BMDLs in there with the actor pieces, renaming the Strings from (Lightining Bolt (a)) if you feel like it. Remove any BMDL references that aren't used in the left window with the - button. Change the ID of the TMPL (I think, it's the reference at the very top). Don't just add 1 to it, use 7gen to generate a new one, I think I've already added 1 to the Superdings ID to make something else. Save the .3cn as whatever you want to call the font.

Now open the .3th, and change the IDs for the three references in there. In addition, View/Edit the top reference and change the ID in that too. Also, view/edit the MBMP, find out the dimensions, and make a new image for your font. For actor fonts, I like to take a screenshot of the Actor's face in front of a textured background, then select a region of the screenshot where you can see the background plus their eyes and maybe part of their face, and resize it to the correct dimensions. You could also just make an image that says "Patrick font" or whatever you need to identify it. I like cool streamlined stuff. Go into view/edit in the mbmp again and import that image (needs to have the 3dmm palette). Save the .3th as whatever you want to call the font.

Now open the .cfg from the copy of Superdings or whatever you used, change the shortname and longname values, and save the .cfg as whatever you want to call the font. Toss all three of these into a zip, rename to vxp, and install.

With your new font and the necessary textures activated in v3dmm, launch 3dmm and you should be able to build the actor as an HMC. Other possibilities are available too, like solid color versions of the actor, or transparent textures for ghostliness or holograms or something. The amount of effort it takes to animate them can make them a bit impractical, but for specific custom animations, it's great.

[Cowtacular Spleen]

Originally posted by Bernatrick
Whatever Russ did with Smash, and whatever you did with Dask for that one test photo where he is leaning over and the wind blows his hair... so I guess the font.

I never did anything with Smash. I made a character font for Augustin in that plane exploding animation. The thing you may be thinking of is where Dee Boned punches Smash in the jaw and he flys back in slowmo. That was a group of textures. Just a body, a leg, a head, and a forearm/hand texture taken from screenshots of Slam at a sideways angle were used.

[Saxon]

SOMEONE DO THIS TO HENRY.

[Fish Taco]

Originally Posted by Aaron Haynes

extract the TMAPs that go along with each one. For stuff like hands, you may need to make a seperate skin texture, because of the way they're normally set up.

Use 7gen to make individual textures out of each of the TMAPs.

Wait. Are you sure you didn't mean, extract all the BMPs from the TMAPs through pencil? Because I just exported every single TMAP file individually. And you can't make textures from tmaps through 7gen .

[Aaron Haynes]

Yeah, I meant the bmps, not the tmap files. I've done it so many times I forgot you could even do that.

[Molotov]

I've been trying this out, but I've come across a problem. I've done everything that Aaron said, exactly. I've double-checked everything. It seems fine. BUT, when I open it up in v3dmm and try to use it, it doesn't work. I try to select the font, but it doesn't change from the font it's already on, and seems to just ignore it. I'll post the vmm:

http://www.psychoholiday.com/uploade...gustinfont.vxp

Help?

[Molotov]

Yes, some help on this would be very good.

[Aaron Haynes]

Change the fourth ID field in the .3th.

View/edit on the first QUAD in pencil and make sure that ID matches the other three.

[Molotov]

I don't understand. What fourth field? The fourth field where? There are only three quads, aren't there?

[Aaron Haynes]

Originally Posted by Aaron Haynes

View/edit on the first QUAD in pencil (in the .3th) and make sure that ID matches the other three.

[Molotov]

Yeah, it does.