N64 Nemu plugin modeling help?

[Rayved]

Hey, I know it's been a while since you tried ripping the models but considering how old the game is, not so much. So anyways, I found a way to speed up the stitching process considerably by using Houdini. Houdini is a procedural program and since the meshes are broken in a certain pattern, it's possible to find that pattern and kind of reverse it.

So if you've noticed, where meshes are broken, it's always in pairs where one triangle is okay and the next one that should fill the whole has a vertex overlapping the wrong one from the good triangle. This image explains it better:



So what we need to do is give that misplaced vertex the proper position, update the UV to fit and then flip the normal on the bad geometry. And we get a result like below.



Well there are a few more steps. Within Houdini, we can branch out to different operations and merge the results together so the very first step is in one branch, to delete all the meshes that are okay (by okay, I mean that they are not part of a pair where one is broken). The Blast Node does it and that very same node has a vey useful option to delete the opposite of what was selected, so you can copy paste it and enable that option. You now have one branch that includes all the corrupt geometry and one branch that includes the good ones and once everything is fixed, we'll just merge it back in.

Before you actually start, export the geometry from Blender or 3ds or whatever as a FBX then import it in Houdini. Here is what the node graph will look like in the end (you have to double click the object to get into it). The 3 top most nodes are just the imported FBX file along with material information:


And I realize that explaining every little detail is gonna take way too much time, so here are images containing the settings of each node from that tree:




I expect people to have questions since Houdini is a complicated tool, so don't hesitate to message me here. I hope this will help some. And by the way, learning this might be a bit tedious at first, but the advantage is that once you've created this system, all you'll have to do is import a different mesh and plug it into it, split the good geometry from the bad one and everything will get automatically fixed.