search

Robert-N7 / abmatt

ANoob's Brres Material Tool for Mario Kart Wii
GNU General Public License v3.0
14 stars 3 forks source link

Documentation / tutorial #82

Open mardy opened 1 year ago

mardy commented 1 year ago

Hi Robert, I just found your project yesterday and it's fantastic! It's an impressive work, and I'm especially glad that you made both a GUI and a CLI version :-)

I'm not new to programming, but I'm definitely new to modding, so I might be asking some silly questions here. :-) But I think that in any case it would be nice to have some documentation or a short tutorial to cover this questions:

  1. The readme says that this tool is for Mario Kart. Yet I tried to open Luigi from the New Super Mario Bros game, and it seems to load well (I also exported one polygon as Collada and could see it in Blender, with textures and armature). If this tool is indeed a generic tool for brres, maybe we could add a link to https://wiki.vg-resource.com/BRRES in the readme, since in that page there's a list of games using the format?
  2. It not clear to me what are the possible ways of modifing a model and reimporting it back into the game. Specifically:
    1. Can one export the model as Collada and then edit it in blender, then re-export as Collada and import it back into abmatt, or will something get lost/broken in the process?
    2. If one only wants to modify a texture, what's the simplest way to do that?
    3. If one exports a model from a second game (which also uses brres) and renames the polygons and the armatures to match those of an existing model in the first game, is it reasonable to expect that one can replace a model from the first game using the model from the second game? Would be super cool to have a tutorial showing this.
Robert-N7 commented 1 year ago

Hi Mardy, thanks for your interest in this project.

  1. The short answer is it has only been tested with MKWii. Mkwii uses v11 for mdl0 files. Fur vectors/layers are not supported. Theoretically other games using the same version as MKWii should be compatible. If someone was interested in adding compatibility for other versions, I wouldn't say no :)

  2. i. Abmatt supports converting to and from Collada and Wavefront OBJ. Here's a quick tutorial https://youtu.be/TWO-9MEQPnE ii. To change a texture, you can replace it using the gui by clicking a material and then double clicking the image. III. See answer 1… there's been no testing of Brres from other games. In Mario kart Wii there's documentation of the specific formatting required for different tracks to function on the wiki (https://wiki.tockdom.com/wiki/Main_Page). I imagine documentation specific for other games probably exists somewhere.

mardy commented 1 year ago

Thanks! I'll try to find some time to add this to the README then :-)