Basic ModView Operation

All right, I know that you’re not a complete idiot, and you know how to open a program,… right?  Okay, now that we’ve got it open let’s see what we have.  We have the standard pull down menus lining the top, and a toolbar just under them.  In the toolbar we have the standard icons inclded in most programs new, open, save, etc,…

Opening a Model
First we need to open a model.  While in ModView click on the open icon, or click and pull down the file menu to open.  Now browse through the folders until you come to: \Star Wars JK II Jedi Outcast\GameData\base\models\players, and look through the available folders until you find 'kyle'.  Since this is your first time I thought I would start with a familiar face.  Open the model.glm by either double clicking it or select it and click the open button.  Now if you’ve followed my instructions correctly you should be seeing Kyle Katarn’s ugly mug.

 
Positioning the Model
Now we need to get a better view of the model.  With the mouse, use the left button and click on the viewing screen and hold it down.  This will turn the model to the left and right, up and down. Cool huh?!

Okay now that we’ve established that we can change the angle we view him at,….
You did get him to turn right?

We now move on to the right mouse button.  When you click and hold it down while on the viewing screen, you can zoom in and out by moving the mouse up and down.  I know what you’re thinking, “Well, who wants a nice close up picture of his knees?”… right?

Press the left mouse button and holding down the ‘ALT’ key on the keyboard.   This should give you the freedom to move the model around and focus on any part of it that you wish.  Now should you wish to reset the angle and distance of the model to it’s original position, click the button on the right side of the toolbar,
which looks like  o-o-o.
 

Screenshots
When you want to share how your model looks with the rest of the world the best way to do it is by taking a screenshot from ModView.  In order to do this, simply position the model how you like and press CNTRL+C, which will copy the image viewing window.  Now open up your image editor and paste it as a new image.  And there you have your screen shot.  If the text is still present at the top of the image you can turn it off for the screenshot by accessing the view pulldown menu and selecting the ‘remove all highlights/text etc before taking screenshot’ option.  This will remove all seen text from the screenshots, with the exception of the Raven copyright in the lower left hand corner.

Now what the hell am I doing???

Okay, We’ve covered the basics, and now we want to try more,…  So what else
is there?  Well, a lot actually.

We’ll start with the white bar on the left side of the window, I’m sure you’ve noticed it by now and are dying to know what it is.  At the very top you’ll see the model.glm again and before it the box with the + inside it.  Click the box and it should start up a directory tree.  We should have Surfaces, Tag Surfaces, Bones, Skins Available, and Sequences.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Surfaces
The 3-D model we’ve been looking at is made up of various shaped polygons. When you group these polygons together you create a surface.  Now open the Surfaces section of the directory tree. Click on the word Surfaces.  When you do this, it highlights the polygons that make up all the surfaces of the 3-D model. Click on the word ’////////stupidtriangle_off’ to remove the polygon highlights.

Now open the ’////////stupidtriangle_off’ section, and then the hips section.  You should have the majority of  the Surfaces tree open now.  All right, we can see three types of sections written now.  They are the ones that are just simply words, ones that start with an *, and ones that start with ////////.  The words that start with the * are tagged surfaces, We don’t really need to worry about those right now.  The other two types are the surfaces. The ones with //////// in front of them, are surfaces that have been turned off.  You can turn surfaces off and on by right clicking the word and selecting either ‘set status : on’ or off. Let’s try it out.  Say we want Kyle Katarn, but without his shoulder pad. First we open the torso section, then the 5th section down is the ‘torso_shoulder_pad’ surface. Right click this and set status to off.  We should now hve Kyle without his shoulder pad.  You can experiment with turning the surfaces on and off, but remember this is only for the modview’s use and does not save which surfaces have been turned on or off.  When you’re done playing around with it, and you want to have it back to the way it was before you can simply right click on the Surfaces menu and choose the appropriate option
 

Tag Surfaces and Bones
Beginners probably won’t really need to mess with the Tag Surfaces or the Bones, so we’ll leave those to the more experienced editors. I've included some of their functions at the bottom of this page.
 

Skins Available
This is where we can view the different skins for this model.  When we open the Skins section we get a new list of skins. the model is always reverted to the default skin when you start.  You can notice that the team skins (red & blue) are located here. Let’s open the blue one shall we,… Simply double click the word blue, and it will replace the skin previously visible on the model.  If you’ve altered a texture of the skin while the model is open, you can refresh the textures by clicking the button on the right half of the toolbar, which looks like the word ‘TEX’ sitting above an oval.

Now that we have that covered let’s move on to the animations.
 

Sequences
We’ve seen the model in it’s default pose, but what does it look like in different positions or when it moves?  Here’s where you find out.  Like before open up the sequences section of the directory tree.  You are now given a list of every animation used throughout the game.  The very top one is the default pose for modview.  You can select an animation by double clicking it. Double click the third selection under the sequences section.  It should be titled 'BOTH_A1_BL_TR'. Now look up in the tool bar you should see something that looks like it was ripped off the front of your VCR.  The buttons with the arrows are pretty self explanatory, rewind, back one frame, stop, forward one frame, etc,…  Click the single arrow pointing to the right and the model will move through the animation.  By clicking the double arrows it will set the animation to the starting or ending position. By clicking the arrows with the vertical lines you can send the animation back or forward one frame.  By clicking the square you can stop the model from animating.

Other Options

Now that we’ve learned all the basic functions of the model viewer, I’ll start to cover some of the lesser used functions.  I’m going to jump around rather sporadically here, as I don’t even use all of the functions.  I’ll just try to cover what I use the most, then work my way out from there,…

.MVS Files
The mvs files are files that tell ModView which surfaces to turn on or off, the skin to be viewed, and the sequence to pose the model in, when opening the glm file.  Say you’re working on a model that uses surfaces, which can be turned off, and you don’t plan on using them.  You can open up your model and and have these surfaces turned on and off for you automatically.  Just open a mvs file instead of the glm file.  But how do you create a mvs file???  First get the model how you want it to be, including skin, surfaces, and sequence.  Now use the FILE pulldown menu and select ’write script’. This will create your mvs file.  Just save it into the directory of the model you are using.  When you want to open your mvs file simply use the FILE pulldown menu again and select ’read script’.

 
Alpha Transparencies
Through the use of shaders in the game you can get transparent textures which utilize alpha transparencies.  The model viewer is capable of viewing these transparencies, but for some reason the effect is opposite of what it will be in-game.  Simply use the VIEW pulldown menu and select ‘…  using alpha blend’.
 

LOD’s
The game engine utilizes LOD’s, or levels of detail, to help save on the amount of polygons on the screen at one time.  Depending on the distance from the viewer, the game will accesses lower poly models to save on space.  There are 4 LOD’s in JKII, 1 being the highest, and 4 the lowest.  You can view these by pressing the F keys, F1 = LOD1, F2 = LOD2, Etc,…
 

Background Color
You can change the color of the background in your viewer by using the ‘choose background colour’ from the EDIT pulldown menu.  I don’t really advise this unless you’reworking with a lot of gray in your skin.  The default gray is a fairly neutral color and will work best in most situations.

Advanced Usage

Here are a few functions that the average user doesn't really have a need for.

Tag Surfaces
Unless you plan on doing some model or animation editing you won’t need to mess with the Tag Surfaces or the Bones, so we’ll leave those to the more experienced editors.  However, if you want to see what a weapon will look like in the models hand you can add a weapon by following these instructions.  Expand the Tags list, right-click on the *r_hand tag, select bolt model to this tag surface (adding to any already there)

then find the weapon you want to put in his hand. We'll just use base\models\weapons2\briar_pistol\briar_pistol_w.glm the weapon should now be in his hand as if he were holding it.
 

Bones
Now say I want the model to look like he's holding the stormtrooper blaster while running.  There is no set animation for this, but it's a combination of two different sequences.  The process isn't easy, and I don't suggest you bother with this unless you feel like you know what you're doing.

First we'll select the point where the two animations will differ.  For the effect we want we need to choose the upper lumbar.  Right click the upper lumbar and choose set as secondary anim start.  Since the hirarchy works from the pelvis outward, this will effct everything from the abdomen up.

Now we need to choose our animations.  Find BOTH_RUN1 right click it and choose Add to Multi-Lock sequences.  Now his lower half is set to play out the running sequence.

Now find TORSO_WEAPONREADY3 and right click it, only this time choose Add to Secondary Multi-Lock sequences.  This will set everything from the upper lumbar up to the weapon ready sequence.

Now if you hit the play button the model should look like he's running while holding the blaster.  The game features multiple combinations of animations, but I think that ModView only supports two at a time.