Mass Effect LE - random mesh port - part 2

Some further exploration here, since I've seen some interest over this, but I'm basically done. Ported and skinned two more pieces (same old pants that I released years ago and the PA Sneakers), basically making a full outfit.

Bellow is a longer post detailing some of what I learned trying to mod this game, for people who are curious about this stuff and want to read some of my ramblings :)

TLDR; Ported outfit to LE ME2/3, it is functional and I will probably release it on here, since there's no reason not to.

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• figured out my vertex normal issue, so the model no longer has the hard seams like in the last post's images. The exporter also seems to keep whatever normals the mesh is assigned, so I can basically get 1 to 1 shading ingame with the way I intend my model to look. Nice :)

• I also figured out that the game supports better (newer BC7) compression so the texture quality (mostly normals) has been increased

• did some experiments on the materials/textures. I kinda have them down for ME3, so the models look best there, but for ME2 it's another story. They just behave weirdly, so I'm still confused there. Overall, materials are a complete clusterfk of a confusing mess in this game series. Still, it's enough for the outfit to be playable, even if it's not looking the absolute best it can be in engine. For textures, I did make some small changes, but they're mostly still the PBR version, so they're not entirely suited for this game engine. Values are a bit all over the place and the diffuse textures are too basic for this type of game. Old game engines like this relied more on baked-in lighting and effects into the textures, whereas newer engines don't. That being said, again, still enough to be playable, even if they're not tweaked to perfection.

• speaking of, I mentioned Mass Effect 2 in the previous paragraph, so yes, I did also backport this outfit to ME2 after figuring out ME3. There's lots of overlap, so it's not too bad. The first 3 main images of this post are actually from ME2, forth being ME3 :)

  Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2

• one very unfortunate discovery is that all meshes need to be merged together into one. Nothing annoying on the surface, but there is a limit to the amount of triangles (or vertices not sure) one single mesh can have and that is around 65k. Fallout 4 also has this limit, however you're not forced to have only one joined model there and can split it into multiple pieces (as long as those pieces are under) in the same nif file, so in practice the limit doesn't exist.

• here, you're forced to have everything merged together and the total must be under 65k which kinda puts a damper on the prospect of porting more varied outfits. My models are in general on the higher end (alright by modern standards I think, but definitely not alright by this game's standard) since I like to have more detailed meshes, but it's tricky building more outfits with multiple pieces and keeping under that limit.

• the outfit showcased here is around 35k triangles, so it's already half of the total possible budget. If I wanted to add a jacket to this outfit, let's say something like the Motoko Jacket I made (since I think it would fit the game's aesthetic), well that jacket itself is around 30k tris (or slightly over) so I'm basically up to the limit or just over it and straight up can't do it.

• there is a way around it by using the armor system where there's 4 (5 with the head ?) separare pieces so the limit would become 4/5 * 65k but it's not an ideal solution since if you've played the game, you know casual/armor outfits are used in separate scenarios. Also ME1 doesn't have this armor system so it would not work there if I wanted to port things to that game. VERY unfortunate :(

• still, it was a nice diversion, I haven't been this engaged modding something in a long time, so pretty fun figuring things out. Might do more ports in the future for this game. I'm definitely eyeing something like my Ares Armor which would fit this game/s style and be suitable as a combat armor. Since the game/s has/have cutscenes and stuff, I think something like that would be very cool to have for gameplay.

• To be continued hopefully someday ...