LithUnWrap

I've recently made a model and ran into a strange problem.. as seen here:

http://www.wc3campaigns.com/showthre...610#post566610

I believe the problem is with LithUnWrap, because I created a model in Milkshape, and I followed the tutorial about modeling in milkshape, but the LithUnWrap part was a bit sketchy. Heres my problem.. I open my model in LithunWrap and I see my skin, with all kinds of lines and points. It looks like this:



I do what the tutorial said and go to file -> UV map -> Save. I save the .bmp and it looks kinda like this:



So, I decided not to use the UV Mapping. Instead I took the two files, face.bmp and body.blp and converted them in the Warcraft III viewer to .blp. I opened the model and changed it to use textures body.blp and face.blp, and uploaded them all correctly into the world editor. Now I play the map and I get this as my model:



I think the problem is skinning.. should I have used the UV mapping. If so how do I do it correctly when I have two skin files and only 1 UV map?

One quick update. Can bad skinning cause a model to become invisible or corrupted somehow? Because in the model viewers everything is correct, and the model is perfect, but the skins are the only thing I did differently than the tutorial showed me. So I just wanna make sure that it was skinning that caused this problem.

The invisible parts will be due to alpha. Check your alpha channel.

Are the visible parts of the skin correct? They look a bit grey to me, but is it lined up? If it isn't then your UVW follows the lower image.

Tell us more.

Okay I went through and I think I found the problem. (not sure though)

I took a quick peek at the .blp files that my model was using with the image extractor. Heres what the face.blp was supposed to look like:



Here's what the .blp looked like:


The body.blp was the same way. I'm not sure what caused it though. I check the UV mapping on all of the original models and images, and they all lined up perfectly. I used the Warcraft III viewer that was a plug-in in the WC3 Map Utilities to convert my .bmp to .blp, and thats the result. I read a tutorial that dealt with using milkshape to model, and I seen where it says use skins in the format of 32-bit .tga or .bmp, and the original file I was converting only seem to be 8-bit, the problem is I don't know how to convert them.

As for alpha channels.. I tried making an alpha channel in photoshop, but it won't let me save it as .tga or .bmp becuase it wont save the alpha channel. I'll be glad to upload my .tga files (8-bit) and my .mdx model and let you have a go at it, unless you can tell me how to fix this problem.

I create the alpha channel in photoshop and get it all ready. When I try and save in .tga it wont save alpha channels, the only save option I can select is 'as a copy'. I try and save it that way, and open up Wc3 extractor II, and when i go to open, face.tga, it gives me an error:

The file D:\Projects\face.tga has an unsupported compression.

Maybe someone would be nice enough to take my two skin files, edit them, and convert them to .blp for me? (All they need is added alpha channels, and to be converted)

Through a bit of .bat file editing and a little custom script, I managed to add opaque alpha alpha channels and both of the .blp files turned out perfect, but now the face on my model uses the body.blp for both the head and the body. I managed to get it to work though, heres a cropped in-game screenshot.



This model was one of my old models from another game, and I converted it from .smd format. Once I get this model 100% working.. ill start releasing SEVERAL of my models.. This one still has major problems.. but lets see if we can get it running.