N64 Nemu plugin modeling help?

[Catstorm]

I have recently been interested in ripping models from various N64 and Gamecube games. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of discussion about N64 models right now, so I don't really have much of a basis to go off of. While I have some familiarity with Blender, I have never ripped models successfully before, much less posted anything on Models Resource. Of particular interest to me right now is Wave Race 64, one of my favorite N64 games which has no models available online, and I quickly found out that this was probably because the Nemu plugin mangles the models.



Obviously I clean up the duplicate vertices and reset the normals for everything before I start. I use N64Mapper to take out the materials, too. Regardless, everything is missing triangles in a sort of flag-shaped pattern, and attempting to fill in these triangles (using both manual filling and the "Fill Holes" option under Clean Up) usually causes the material/texture to ignore the new face, leaving a bunch of blank white triangles mixed in. I can't figure out how to get them to behave properly.

I've also tried leaving the mtl file as-is rather than removing all the materials and re-adding them manually, and the result is the same. 



I really love the aesthetic of this game, and want to see its landscapes available online. (I also want to use the maps for VRChat, but that's a different story...) Is there any way to remedy this triangle problem? Lemmy's plugin seems like the only available N64 plugin with model ripping capabilities, and other "screen capture" programs don't seem to work very well with Project64 or other emulators - or simply don't work at all on Windows 10. If you have any advice, thank you in advance. 

[AJD-262]

My guess is that some parts may be culled out if you are not facing them when doing the 3d screen shot and that is why you have holes.

When you fill in the holes Blender may not know to what texture to display over the new face/tri at least it is that way with me and Blender 2.78c. So if this is the case you need to select the white face and in the UV/Image Editor load the image that the white face should be using.

Also a guess that the UV mapping for the new face/tri you made will be wrong so you will need to move some the UV vertexes around to get things to match.

I have used 3D Ripper DX with a DirectX based graphic plugin but I think the models had distortion problems.

[Catstorm]

I'll update this thread with what ended up working for me so that anyone else trying to rip models from similarly messed-up games has at least one method for managing it. So I learned about editing UV maps and tried remapping the gray faces' UVs to great success. It's time-consuming, but it works. Texture flickering from multiple overlapping faces can also be reduced by using Limited Dissolve.

   
(Filling the holes with UV map textures. This area is messy and still needs Limited Dissolve)

   
(These trees have had Limited Dissolve used on them and their UV maps fixed, reducing the overlap effect)

As for culling, in Wave Race it seems to only cull objects separate from the main map, like the buoys and L/R arrows. The triangle effect also happens actively in game if you play with the Nemu plugin or emulator. The missing triangles occur consistently on the map, even when the player is right next to the object in question, and even for polygons that are used for UI like the "POWER UP" message.

   

This is another amateur question, but... Does the Models Resource have a standard for how much "editing" needs to be done in order for the model to be 'accurate'? Having done all of this, the map looks nearly the same, even if faces have been simplified, and some areas have handiworked UV mapping. I think the only thing preventing me from uploading everything is that I'd need to combine multiple screenshots to get all the buoys and L/R arrow markers.

[AJD-262]

I think some of the MK64 tracks are done by "stitching" like you are doing. Check the comments for MK64 and MK64 Courses.

[Fengo]

+1 for stitching tracks. I ripped the Ridge Racer tracks for my own purposes, and while how they need to be stitched together is a giant tedious pain, I haven't found any other way to get certain models in one fell swoop. There are some games (Beetle Adventure Racing for example) which have really good culling, like, the front of the car is culled out with a chase camera, it's really good, and makes ripping the biggest pain ever. Time and patients, is what I found is most needed basically.

[Rayved]

Hey, I know it's been a while since you tried ripping the models but considering how old the game is, not so much. So anyways, I found a way to speed up the stitching process considerably by using Houdini. Houdini is a procedural program and since the meshes are broken in a certain pattern, it's possible to find that pattern and kind of reverse it.

So if you've noticed, where meshes are broken, it's always in pairs where one triangle is okay and the next one that should fill the whole has a vertex overlapping the wrong one from the good triangle. This image explains it better:



So what we need to do is give that misplaced vertex the proper position, update the UV to fit and then flip the normal on the bad geometry. And we get a result like below.



Well there are a few more steps. Within Houdini, we can branch out to different operations and merge the results together so the very first step is in one branch, to delete all the meshes that are okay (by okay, I mean that they are not part of a pair where one is broken). The Blast Node does it and that very same node has a vey useful option to delete the opposite of what was selected, so you can copy paste it and enable that option. You now have one branch that includes all the corrupt geometry and one branch that includes the good ones and once everything is fixed, we'll just merge it back in.

Before you actually start, export the geometry from Blender or 3ds or whatever as a FBX then import it in Houdini. Here is what the node graph will look like in the end (you have to double click the object to get into it). The 3 top most nodes are just the imported FBX file along with material information:


And I realize that explaining every little detail is gonna take way too much time, so here are images containing the settings of each node from that tree:




I expect people to have questions since Houdini is a complicated tool, so don't hesitate to message me here. I hope this will help some. And by the way, learning this might be a bit tedious at first, but the advantage is that once you've created this system, all you'll have to do is import a different mesh and plug it into it, split the good geometry from the bad one and everything will get automatically fixed.