roundel0 - Comments

I need a bit more time to work on this, but hopefully not too long.

Wow, thank you so much! Yes, the y-axis was flipped on the fm21 model. I'm very open to collaborating on more other game converters if you're interested.

As for the models needing to be very close, I think in this case they are actually already similar enough (maybe more similar than PES→FM), and the pose was identical. 

I did a few things which I thought would make the raytracer more accurate –  I limited the ray distance, limited how far the hit points could be from each other, I put a lower bound on the dot product of the normals of each mesh at the hit points, and it also sweeps along the normal a little bit too instead of just having a constant distance from the surface to give it some wiggle room, not sure if all this made a difference though or if these kits were just very similar to begin with.

Here is how the conversion looks now, and the remaining problem areas that I could find. I think the back where the shorts and shirt meet, and the radius of the collar are going to be the most difficult fixes as these are the biggest differences between the models. I'll stick with it and see what I can do, also still open to all advice and suggestions.

Alright, all I need now is the FM24 kit models – I made a proof of concept for the raycast-based UV remapping scanner. I used the model from this github repo to test it, but it appears to have different UVs from the FM24 kits:

https://github.com/alexmichelet/3dkits-viewer/tree/master

So, the way this works is, it casts rays in all directions from just above the surface of the new model, and when one ray hits both the new and the old model, it considers the hit-points to be the same position on the kit. Then, it finds the UV of that point on the old kit, and the UV of that point on the new kit, and writes those values to the .exr remapping file.

After that's done, I can use the same python script as before to convert the old texture to the new mapping (in this case, I used a UV test texture, then converted that using the remapping). 

You can see that between these two models, the remapping worked really well – the alignment and positioning looks essentially perfect, with just a few flaws to correct.

So, if somebody can help me find out how to get the FM24 kit models, we should be good to go. Does anyone know if I can get the kit models using the resource archiver? 

Once I get the quality perfect I'll post a standalone bulk converter program.

At the moment the quality is worse than with Bhawkski's technique – his remapping is much better, but with further development it can be improved. There are some natural issues because of the differences in the UV layouts between 24 and 26 that will always make doing this imperfect, the player models are different after all. I think with a combination of effort between myself (I can work on the tool to add more precise controls, and make it more professional style, and a standalone program), and you guys who have been in the modding community for longer (who know more than me about the templates and would likely be more skilled with the tool to create a better mapping than I can), we could create a better result. Theoretically the best result is one where the proportions and angles are all correct, but there will still always be some blurriness.

But yes, at the moment the kits created from this tool are NOT ready for uploading – just for personal use.

Also there is some potential that I can experiment more with other techniques, I can get the FM26 models from the unity build, but I don't know how to get the FM24 model. If I had the fm24 model, then I could attempt some sort of raycasting-based technique or something to find a direct conversion, I think this would be the key to making conversions viable for upload. I'm absolutely open to directly collaborating on this stuff. If you're worried about this causing a ton of bad quality uploads, I can remove the attachments for now until we make something better?

I liked this idea but I don't have photoshop, so I went ahead and created a python script that bulk converts folders of fm24 kits to fm26. I made a UV Remapping tool in Unity, it exports a .exr file which has the UV remap data.

The python script takes a path to the fm24 kits, an output directory, and the path to the .exr remapping file, and it bulk converts the folder by applying the UVs from the .exr to the fm24 kit texture. You will need to have the right python packages installed to use it – numpy, pillow, openexr, imath.

I've attached:

-the python bulk conversion script (edit the script to put your paths in)

-my attempt at an .exr remapping file (point the python script to this)

-the Assets folder of my unity project (you only need this if you want to modify the UV mapping – it works with the free version of Unity)

I'm more of a technical guy so my remapping isn't perfect, if you want to try to make a better one you can create a new unity project, drop my assets folder in, then go to Tools→FM Kit Remapper to open the window. You should have my remap asset that you can modify, but you may need to select it. When you're done click the Bake button at the bottom to export the .exr

Not sure if this will be useful to you guys, I made it for myself since I don't have photoshop, but I thought I may as well share it.

Oh, and there's a bug in the unity tool where when you add a new region you may need to close and open the window again to see it take effect. If that doesn't work try changing a line in the code to force a recompile.