CVR Editor v1 (4/2/2014) is now available.

[Kilkakon]

I believe in necroposting.

Gave this a go today. Got some feedback and areas in which the editor could use improvement. I've attached the results of today's work as well.

Firstly, there is a sore need for a bigger brush size. I did all this with a 1x1 pixel brush and it took hours haha~

Secondly, the program can't get at the little crevices that are covered up by other things. For example, in the chassis image, I can't get at the inside edges of the wheel or under the suspension tubing.

Still, was able to make a naked Scout Patrol! would be proud.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I wonder if it would be feasible to find a basic open source graphics editor, at least MSPaint-level good, and incorporate it wholesale into an upgrade, Ford?  Like, the potential of just being able to custom decorate the standard units is a huge breakthrough for what modders can do, on the art end.  -It's always been that elaborate WWII mod/scenario stuck with the same old space units...

[Buster's Uncle]

...So is there anything out there that would meet the .cvr editor needs?  I wouldn't know if I saw it, alas, having no experience with 3D...

[Geo]

Tried it out a bit today.

Basically I agree with Kilkakon's remarks about painting things in this app.
And having two-colored parts is a burden to work on since the scale is way too small to work exactly on the border of color boundaries.

[Chiu ChunLing]

Unfortunately, Caviar is VERY different from normal 3D modeling.  I mean that in both ways, now that I understand the idea behind their voxel mesh (and the high performance rendering it can achieve) I'm disheartened that it is not more commonly used (there are so many possibilities, think of playing Minecraft with an effective view distance of miles rather than a fraction of a kilometer).  It's also inconvenient because the kinds of tools that are useful for modding other 3D model types are not applicable to .cvr files.

Basically, rather than having a 2D graphic texture "wrapped" onto a 3D model made up of polygons, Caviar has the color indexes referenced in each voxel.  Each group as a whole is really a thread that is extruded about in three dimensions (rather like making a clay model by rolling a 'snake' and then winding it back and forth to build up a form, the metaphor is also apt to the "normal" process that visually 'smooths' the voxels into a surface for display).

Basically, the palate is separate from the model information, but the application of the palate to individual voxels doesn't have a separate 2D amenable step, a "skin" like with other models.

[rmolina]

(rather like making a clay model by rolling a 'snake' and then winding it back and forth to build up a form, the metaphor is also apt to the "normal" process that visually 'smooths' the voxels into a surface for display).

Or, even better, winding your clay snake around a wax model, and then melting the wax as soon as the model is completely wrapped in clay.

Here is an even nicer analogy:

You can think of this as something like a mummy: the original polygonal model serves as the mummy’s body, which is then completely wrapped in a strand of 3D pixels — thereafter, only this wrapping is used to represent the character.

[Chiu ChunLing]

That's interesting, but it must apply to whatever editing tool they used to create the caviar files in the first place.  The caviar file itself does not contain anything other than the instructions on how to wind the string of voxels into an empty volume.

I suppose it should be possible to rebuild a model from the voxels, Ford discussed trying this but the result was a huge number of polygons.  I think that his approach created too many by thinking of the voxels as cubes, but the point is that the underlying difficulty isn't easily amenable to traditional approaches.

On the other hand, while creating a tool to turn the voxels back into a model and texture seems a bit difficult, it probably isn't so impossible to make something that would turn a conventional model and texture into voxels...if anyone knew how to generate the normal information properly.  They must have had one at some point, right?  The information left in the .cvr files suggest it was some kind of Max plugin.

[DrazharLn]

I don't know what Ford tried, but there are some algorithms for converting voxels into surfaces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isosurface#Implementation_Algorithms

PolyVox is a C++ library that implements the marching cubes algorithm. Though I don't think the algorithms would be that difficult to translate into python or whatever. If you need access to the original papers, I recommend sci hub.

It might be a fun challenge to work out how to map the "texture" from the voxel data onto the mesh.

[bvanevery]

I'm trying this out using Windows 10 and Python 3.6.  Some .cvr files don't load at all.  Others, I see something, but darned if I know what I'd do with them.  This makes swallowing Blender look easy.

[bvanevery]

Today I read the whole thread.  I used the Caviar Player utility to look at various .cvr files.  I now realize that some .cvr files only contain animation, not geometry.  So that may be why nothing happened when I opened certain random files with CVR-Colorizer.

As for application, one possibility is changing the appearance of Pulse and Resonance armors compared to normal armors.

Just tried the GitHub version of CVR-Colorizer again.  Most .cvr files I click on, do not open.  They opened ok in Caviar Player, so there goes my "animations only" theory.

Trying to open files was taking me to an inconvenient directory, when I tried to open files over and over again.  For more convenience, I copied all .cvr files to the CVR-Colorizer directory, hoping I'd get more locality of context.  Jury's out on that, but files started opening that previously weren't.  So maybe there are some pathing or installation issues with the tool.

I am now seeing that the tool is probably meant to be used in the same directory as .cvr files, such as the top level SMAC installation directory.  I have inadvertently replicated this setup out of frustration.  There is a navigational bar that gives the name of the file, something about what Mesh it is a part of, and the ability to go forwards or backwards in the list of files.  The rendering is slow and the transition between files requires some waiting, but it is probably faster than opening files individually.  At least now I can go through all the files and see what's actually available to change.  Previously I thought I was going to have to do that manually, with a lot of menu opening and closing, to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't.

On second thought, I think I'm wrong about what that navigation bar is for.  It looks like it's for navigating meshes within a single .cvr file.  So I probably will have to open all files manually, to see what works.  The rendering of these internal meshes is slow.  I won't quite declare it to be unusable, but you'd have to be really motivated to make a specific change to some unit.  Just tooling around to figure out what you might like to do, is no joy at all.

Actually the speed of rendering might be content dependent.  Either that or Python is compiling its bytecode in a cache?

The tool died with an Error on opening AATMANIP.cvr.  Caviar Player says "This file does not contain geometry".

Some other file took long enough to load, that I thought perhaps CVR-Colorizer was locked up.  It wasn't, it's just really slow rendering.  I'm thinking it's not Python bytecode optimization stuff, I don't even know if that's how it works anyways.  There's a folder called __pycache__ that got generated, that contains a file named CVR.cpython-36.pyc.  The really slow file turns out to be the Alien colony pod.  Lotta squiggles I guess.

Ok, I get the idea, at least as far as navigating through files.  I think there are 140 .cvr files to wade through.  A good number of them are like land mines, they blow up in your face and take CVR-Colorizer down.  That and the slow rendering make this quite painful to "explore" with.  If you have a specific agenda already in your mind, of what you'd like to do to some unit, then maybe you'll persevere and figure out how to make your changes to something.  But just dinking around, this is painful, not fun.

It looks like an options.txt file gets generated.  It has a path for starting directory.  I could manually change that to wherever I prefer, so that I'm not always clicking on a directory to open another file.  There's no menu within CVR-Colorizer to change this, you need to change options.txt manually.

[Buster's Uncle]

Revisiting the paste-in request, two things I don't think I communicated well previously:

1.) It would a fantastic improvement to the usefulness of this utility to be able to do the detail work in a more sophisticated graphics program, even without cracking the color issues.

2.) As a modder, I don't necessarily care if the unit works as 3D.  I might want 2D, see this project commencing: https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=22061.0 where I'd expect to paste in the same flat unit image multiple times to get all the frames so AC will use it.  -And if I wanted 3D, I wouldn't mind having to generate the different angles manually; it's still better than not being able to do anything but color what's already there.  Yes, surely this approach wouldn't be compatible with the Workshop, but easy enough to leave instruction with the mod not to use it...

[Buster's Uncle]

SO - it's time for a new thing to promote on Facebook and other forums tomorrow morning- and this looks like the best candidate.  We did some prep for a big promotion that fell through the cracks for reasons of --- probably my mood swings or a random event triggering.

So, Ford, if you see this in time?  Draz?  Any thoughts, anything to add?  I need to write a shortish pitch for the project, about a paragraph, no doubt w/ some selected illos of what it can do from the thread pasted together.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I posted a pic of the Civ6 Rameses II from the latest DLC made not-ludicrously-white yesterday afternoon, 'cause it was a little work already done for a conversation elsewhere, and what the heck.  This morning, I wasn't ready for this, and brown Rameses was drawing a little attention for AC2 - so I left it alone for the week.  Still plenty time to straighten me out on the CVR editor project...

[DrazharLn]

This tool allows modders to paint new colours on (some of) the existing 3D models from the game. The repainted models can be saved over the originals to have them appear in game.

Dunno what else you need.

[Buster's Uncle]

Me either - too much multitasking and drama in progress.