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My first mod attempt crashes the game. What am I doing wrong?

#1
Hi. I'm, trying to learn how to mod SFV. I'm following Uncle Festor and Hungry Caterpillar's tutorial videos. My first mod is simply removing Chun Li's bracelets, just something with an observable difference to see if I can get it to work. I also want to be able to edit textures/materials though I haven't changed them in this mod.

When I make the mod, the game crashes when I try to load it.

[Image: kiwi_zps8xe2k1lx.png]

I think it has something to do with the material files, because the cooked files are 500-700 bytes, not 4kb like the originals.  Viewing them in a hex editor, they don't have as many paths to other files as the originals.



I've outlined each step of my process below. I would appreciate it of someone could point out what I'm doing wrong.

Show ContentFailed modding process:
I've also tried renaming the materials with a _M suffix, then creating the instances, then removing the _inst suffix, not deleting the original materials. That way the textures display on the model after applying the instances to the each element. The _M files  are 459K and the materials files are still ~700 bytes. The game still crashes.


If I delete the Materials and Texture directory, the mod will load. But she has two skirts- A grey one and blue one that doesn't move.


Any ideas?
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#2
I can see you are very attentive.
I don't think that Fatal Error Log can tell you what's really wrong.
and I think you spent too much time on the materials, ironically you can't edit the material (technically you can, but I don't recommend you do that, most modders only use the original materials or borrow the materials from other characters, but they don't create materials). That's why we use material instances, they just work like a cursor or dictionary, they can tell UE4 which original material to use. so, the only thing matters is the name.
This is your first mod, so let's make everything as simple as possible okay?! You want to remove Chunli's bracelets right? Okay, so the only thing you need to do in blender is...
1.import C91_01.fbx (btw, in your case, unfortunately you choose Chunli C1 as your first mod, I think Mr.B extracted this very very long time ago, they don't use C91 anymore, it's CNL now, it's quite confusing right?)
2.in edit mode, select all the bracelets vertexes and delete them.
3.done! export it as a fbx file. that's right, no need to deal with the materials or textures at all. well, if you want to render a wallpaper that's a quite different story though... (btw, when you export the fbx, check the "selected objects", or you may export some objects you don't need)
4.In UE4 Editor, you just do what Uncle Festor told you to do, nothing wrong with that.don't import the textures, you didn't edit them at all right? just after you create the material instances, don't link the textures or something like that. I said you just need it's name so it will lead the Engine to find the original material, leave the model grey is fine (of cause you have to replace all the "C91" to "CNL" )
5. that's all, cook and pack.(oh, don't pack the material instances you cooked, it's important, actually you only need to pack CNL_01.uasset this file alone)
6. good luck~~
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#3
@"GCS-WT"


Total guess, but make sure you do NOT copy the cooked material instances over. You're only setting them up so that the body mesh has correct filepaths cooked into it. 
If you replace the material instances that will definitely cause you to crash.

Keeping that in mind you also don't need to do anything to the materials within unreal in terms of linking them to textures (because again, you can't replace the material instances, so nothing you're doing here will stick), so that's just extra work.

In terms of the skirt not working, it's probably an Apex cloth thing. Apex cloth physics  are lost when you extract a model from the game, So you will either have to use a program to remake the Apex cloth or add bones and redo the physics asset within Unreal.  If you ever see a material group in blender with a duplicate that ends in .001 (in your case CM_CNL_01_E08_Skirt.001) that's a sign of extra verts created by Apex, and you should delete the duplicate (dupes will usually appear at the bottom of the material list after all the others have been listed once). 

[Image: Chun-Materials.jpg]

In this case, E08_Skirt is the dupe, since going down the material list from top to bottom it's the second time E08_Skirt appears. So delete all the verts associated with E08_Skirt, get rid of that material group  then rename the first one from  CM_CNL_E08_Skirt.001 to CM_CNL_E08_Skirt. Now proceed as normal.

That should get you here:
[Image: chun-test2.jpg]

Functional, but the skirt physics won't be working, that's to be expected.


Like Tiggie said, Chun is a difficult first mod.
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#4
Thanks Guys. It's taken a while to reply to this because I've been busy experimenting, sometimes answering my own questions. (usually not)
I appreciate the help with materials, that was driving me nuts.

Sleepy_scrub - Thanks for clearing that up about the Apex cloth physics, saves me from chasing my tail getting the skirt to work.


Now I'm trying to swap mesh parts. I made a mod that changes Chun Li's C3 hair back to the C1 hair (the "oxhorn" style with ribbons) using this procedure:

Blender
Remove C3's hair vertices
Cut out C1's scalp/ribbons, delete everything else
Reparent the scalp to C3
Join the meshes into one mesh
Delete every bone from C1's armature except the ribbon bones (I really don't know what I'm doing here)
Join the C1 armature to the C3 armature
Parent the ribbon bones to the head group (I figured this out myself Dodgy )
Export to FBX
Obviously I need to watch some more Blender videos.

Unreal
Import CNL_03.fbx to the mesh folder
Rename and move the skeleton to CMN folder
Move materials to materials folder
Delete the C1 materials that won't be used
Convert materials to instances
Delete materials, remove "_inst" from instances
Match the material instances to each element in the mesh editor (Some of the elements don't highlight when you highlight them. I'm guessing the 01 parts are at the end?)
Cook

I'm not sure how to get the C1 parts to use the C1 textures... I assume you include it in the mod pack and hex edit the material to point to the 03 directory? 

The result in the game is the ribbons are stiff, the skirt is stiff (I assume this is an issue with the Apex cloth thing?) And the whole model is textured in gray stone from the Unreal editor.
[Image: modfail01_zpshb47k13j.jpg][Image: modfail02_zpsmwxkewhs.jpg]


If I include the original meshes and textures, it's still gray stone. I didn't make any changes to the materials or textures in Blender. So, apparently I'm missing something here.

Also, if I include the CMN/Skeleton/CMN_skeleton.uasset file, the game crashes. Wasn't this to keep the character from being stuck in a T pose? If I don't use it it's fine.
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