[PS2] Armored Core 2 through Armored Core: Last Raven

[Greg]

A few moths ago, I took a break from the Front Mission games just to poke around the the PS2 entries of Armored Core and made a surprisingly rapid amount of progress on their model file formats. The last hurdle I've been experiencing for most of this time is face formation- meshes are composed of either a triangle list (for FX spawn points) or multiple triangle strips. The strips are a problem as it's not clear where one should end and another should begin. I've tried looking in the model file for a flag but found nothing that stood out, then shifted to studying the verts and UVs in hopes they they contain some sort of "rhythm" to no real success. using UVs or the distance between points to determine face formation still yields "bad" faces. I've poked around a few PS2 topics here and it sounds like this is the best I can hope for but would like a second opinion before going forward.               

 

File, meshes, and tmr.7z

Edited Tuesday at 02:16 PM by Greg
accidental post

[roocker666]

I made a script for Noesis but it creates a lot of extra faces. This is a very common problem when you try to autogenerate faces in some PS2 modes, I hate that...

[Greg]

Thanks for the reply. I've shifted to studying the extra faces and have noticed the following characteristics so far - impossible UVs, not forming connections at their hypotenuse either in terms of vert or UV coordinates, bridge large gaps, form at the "seams" of connected faces, etc. It may be possible to filter them out with a long enough chain of if-statements though partial filtering I'm currently performing results in an index error when I try to import the model. I'll report back with the results.