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Guide - MeshGenerator.exe tutorial (1 Viewer)

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ChatWithThisName

ChatWithThisName

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I made a video to hopefully help some users with the mesgenerator.exe found in the release folder create their own professional meshes with options most users don't even know exist.
 
Last edited:
I wish I knew a way to articulate the difference. I was talking with kaen01 and he helped me with Velks where I was saying that I wasn't able to navigate that one spot with the pointed corner. Through trial and error I was actually able to create a bridge across with his assistance. So after I nail down a solid solution that I can reproduce effectively in video I will adjust cell size and tile size.
 
Okay, so it seems that Tile size is accuracy when deleting specific sections of a mesh, IE: in OT where I was removing tiles to keep a character from navigating to that area, and cell size is more about accuracy of the mesh itself.

If you CTRL Click on anything with a slider you can manually enter in numbers, this includes numbers that exceed the maximum and minimums for the slider. So I can create a 0 radius mesh, or a mesh with a tile size of 8 or a cell size of 8 despite the min and max proposed by the Meshgenerator.exe

I've discovered however that in order to navigate across the portion previously mentioned the radius would be set to zero. Which means that you'll probably end up walking off the edges of platforms, running into walls/corners etc. So while you can manipulate the editer to achieve the mesh building across the gap, it's not really useful.
 
wowfool said:
Nice video, I learned some new things. Can you explain the difference with tile and cell size? Why adjust one over the other?
Click to expand...

tile size is just a unit of subdivision. individual tile generation is single threaded, but you can parallelize multiple tiles.. too many tiles and then you have too much overhead of subdivisions. Usually the default value is fine and you just want to leave it alone. Make it too small and it costs more cpu and memory to load the mesh. This number is in terms of cell size (how many cells are in the width of a tile)

the actual value that matters is cell size. Cell size represents the resolution of the mesh. a higher cell size gives a more accurate mesh (mesh is just an approximation of the geometry, so a lower cell size means corners are going to get cut).

Contrary to what ChatWithThisName suggests, do not make tiny tiles. Leave them at the default and use the areas tool to mark parts of the mesh offlimits instead of deleting tiles.
 
Brain, I've used the "Do not walk" option of the areas tool to create an area I wanted to be off limits, when a macro attempts to navigate to the far end of the off limits area, IE: on the other side of it, it will still path up to the off limits area but will then stop and repeatedly try to move, which causes my character to get stuck, which is why I recommended against the use of the do not walk. I primarily encountered this issue when navigating around when I was creating my tutorial.mac where I wanted the user to avoid the edge of a cliff that they were constantly walking off when navigating. Had I not seen it done this way I would have assumed that it worked as you had mentioned. In my experience it has panned out better for me to simply delete the tile. While that doesn't work universally, specially for meshes with multiple floors, I tend to use that method for open single layer zones.

Thank you for clarification on the cell size.
 
ChatWithThisName said:
Brain, I've used the "Do not walk" option of the areas tool to create an area I wanted to be off limits, when a macro attempts to navigate to the far end of the off limits area, IE: on the other side of it, it will still path up to the off limits area but will then stop and repeatedly try to move, which causes my character to get stuck, which is why I recommended against the use of the do not walk. I primarily encountered this issue when navigating around when I was creating my tutorial.mac where I wanted the user to avoid the edge of a cliff that they were constantly walking off when navigating. Had I not seen it done this way I would have assumed that it worked as you had mentioned. In my experience it has panned out better for me to simply delete the tile. While that doesn't work universally, specially for meshes with multiple floors, I tend to use that method for open single layer zones.

Thank you for clarification on the cell size.
Click to expand...

You'll have to provide concrete examples of this, I know of many people that are using the areas tool with great success. I don't mind that you do it, but I would prefer that we teach people how to do things using the proper tools.
 
tile.size:64
cell.size:0.250
cell.height:0.125

agent.size:8
agent.radius:4

max.climb:4
max:slope:65

good numbers it wont do well in all zones, since not all doorways will allow height and radius of that so lower to 6 and 2 in those cases.
 
also beware really tall zones, like bot, and such cell.height will neeed to be more like .750 in that zone.
 
ChatWithThisName said:
Brain, I've used the "Do not walk" option of the areas tool to create an area I wanted to be off limits, when a macro attempts to navigate to the far end of the off limits area, IE: on the other side of it, it will still path up to the off limits area but will then stop and repeatedly try to move, which causes my character to get stuck, which is why I recommended against the use of the do not walk. I primarily encountered this issue when navigating around when I was creating my tutorial.mac where I wanted the user to avoid the edge of a cliff that they were constantly walking off when navigating. Had I not seen it done this way I would have assumed that it worked as you had mentioned. In my experience it has panned out better for me to simply delete the tile. While that doesn't work universally, specially for meshes with multiple floors, I tend to use that method for open single layer zones.

Thank you for clarification on the cell size.
Click to expand...

I can confirm this, have had issues similar when using KA, the macro will cause the character to get stuck, usually at a wall because it thinks there is a mob behind the wall. Even though I've used the cropping tool or removed the tile from the mesh completely.


brainiac said:
You'll have to provide concrete examples of this, I know of many people that are using the areas tool with great success. I don't mind that you do it, but I would prefer that we teach people how to do things using the proper tools.
Click to expand...

I've pointed it out and mentioned it multiple times on the issue. Frankly, I just gave up on mentioning it -as I've said it multiple times on the forums and discord to you personally.

1) Sebilis crypt tunnel area

2) The Breeding Grounds rat tunnels
 
those isssues are often the resulst of bad geometry, i hyad some issues in pok too, where in some areas it would try an skip going up the ramps to the library, but i kept fidddling with the ramps making them more accessible, and eventually it went the right way. its all about the math i think of how long tthe distance is specially in multi layered places.

but i odnt know the spcifics, if increasing the tile.size and lowering the cell.size will change costs. but sometimes it feels like if a cost is too big it just takles the closests path and doesnt care about if there is a mesh or not. cause kiss test specifically for if there is a mesh path available so it shouldnt. and /nav spawn should also check i believe.
 
aspire2008 said:
I can confirm this, have had issues similar when using KA, the macro will cause the character to get stuck, usually at a wall because it thinks there is a mob behind the wall. Even though I've used the cropping tool or removed the tile from the mesh completely.




I've pointed it out and mentioned it multiple times on the issue. Frankly, I just gave up on mentioning it -as I've said it multiple times on the forums and discord to you personally.

1) Sebilis crypt tunnel area

2) The Breeding Grounds rat tunnels
Click to expand...

I'm not able to go into the game and test in combat areas. The in-game navigation uses the same pathing algorithm as the path tester in meshgenerator. You should be able to assign start and end positions and test the mesh in the tool without going into the game.
 
Doing testing in the mesh generator with the "not walkable" it appears to show as indicated by brain. I'm unsure exactly what was causing my glitch in the past. But best I can tell the "not walkable" is basically the same thing as creating a mesh and then deleting tiles, but the tiles it overwrites as not walkable show as not even drawn as if I had deleted them. The difference in this case being that the tiles that are removed are limited to within the area of the volume for not walkable and it does not affect layers above and below as it does when you remove the tiles manually as indicated during the OT Section of my video.

I of course intend for my video to educate people on the proper ways to use the meshgenerator and do not want to provide bad information if avoidable. I'm going to look into some free video editing software and see if I add/remove sections to the video to provide the most current information.
 
brainiac What is the purpose of the "walkable" area? I had hoped it would allow for creating exceptions when dealing with illusionary walls, however I'm yet to find an actual use for "Walkable". Ideally, there would be something that overrides the global settings in the tile edit tool. However, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Much like I had hoped that the built in water volume would allow the navigation to override any "Max Climb" to allow the navigation tool to assume that climb was infinite while inside of the volume. The issue for that being obvious trying to navigate from Undershore to Ruins of Illisan where MQ2Nav follows the water floor until it reaches the sharp edge just before the zoneline and then stops. I initially encountered this issue recently when programming InTheDark.mac where I had to navigate to a set location on the shore line and then issue a /moveto loc command because moveto looks in the directly of the location and does not follow the z height of the ground in the world as nav does. Also possibly set it so that MQ2Nav does not use the base of the world where a water volume is located and isntead allows for "mid air" locations inside of a water volume, producing an effective swim to location as opposed to attempting to walk.

With these quirks aside, it's still an invaluable tool for navigating the world, a couple more features would have this thing completly taking over any thoughts of a mix mash of moveto commands.
 
mq2nav is a 2d 3d mapping program, so it makes a 2d representation of a 3d world. so it will not be able to tell a height without a 3d mapping program. So with mq2nav you will always be on the "floor" just on multiple floor its just more map as a slice stacked.
 
i was talking about that walkable area, it would allow for very precise controlled this is how i want my mesh to look like right here, areas.
 
Well then I suppose the next question for brainiac would be what's it going to take to implement the 3d aspect of things to allow for destinations above the grounds z axis. I'm aware it has been crowdfunded in the past, is this something we could again crowd fund?
 
i was thinking about that walkable area, it would allow for very precise controlled this is how i want my mesh to look like right here, areas.
 
ChatWithThisName said:
brainiac What is the purpose of the "walkable" area? I had hoped it would allow for creating exceptions when dealing with illusionary walls, however I'm yet to find an actual use for "Walkable". Ideally, there would be something that overrides the global settings in the tile edit tool. However, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Much like I had hoped that the built in water volume would allow the navigation to override any "Max Climb" to allow the navigation tool to assume that climb was infinite while inside of the volume. The issue for that being obvious trying to navigate from Undershore to Ruins of Illisan where MQ2Nav follows the water floor until it reaches the sharp edge just before the zoneline and then stops. I initially encountered this issue recently when programming InTheDark.mac where I had to navigate to a set location on the shore line and then issue a /moveto loc command because moveto looks in the directly of the location and does not follow the z height of the ground in the world as nav does. Also possibly set it so that MQ2Nav does not use the base of the world where a water volume is located and isntead allows for "mid air" locations inside of a water volume, producing an effective swim to location as opposed to attempting to walk.

With these quirks aside, it's still an invaluable tool for navigating the world, a couple more features would have this thing completly taking over any thoughts of a mix mash of moveto commands.
Click to expand...

Walkable lets you cancel out an unwalkable area.. Like if you want to draw a large area as unwalkable and have a small part of it be walkable. Thats all.. It can't be used to create mesh out of thin air unfortunately.

Also, MQ2Nav has no knowledge of water volumes, I've been working on rewriting the zone parsing code but I've been busy with other endeavors and haven't finished it, unfortunately.
 
ChatWithThisName said:
Well then I suppose the next question for brainiac would be what's it going to take to implement the 3d aspect of things to allow for destinations above the grounds z axis. I'm aware it has been crowdfunded in the past, is this something we could again crowd fund?
Click to expand...

Existing MQ2Nav/MeshGenerator uses RecastNavigation (an open source library) to do all of the generation of navigation meshes and the pathfinding on them. Recast does not support navigation through 3d volumes, so that would have to be written separately and integrated with the existing mesh navigation.

This could take a hundred or more hours to build, and I have other existing projects I haven't completed yet (like off-mesh links -- teleporters for example). Its something I want to do, but not something I have the time for without serious compensation. My time is valuable and I also have a family so its difficult.
 
creepyoldude said:
reason I'm asking is trying to set up with mq2 war mq2 shaman and mq2 cleric I cant go to /war mode 5 it says i need to mesh zone.
Click to expand...
if you haven't already, you should just download the existing meshes from the VV Launcher, as you will need meshes for every zone.

here is one of the VV videos explaining mq2nav and how to use the launcher to download the meshes


on the VV Launcher you can "launch mes updater"
1618175447639.png
 
Sic said:
if you haven't already, you should just download the existing meshes from the VV Launcher, as you will need meshes for every zone.

here is one of the VV videos explaining mq2nav and how to use the launcher to download the meshes


on the VV Launcher you can "launch mes updater"
View attachment 29432
Click to expand...

yes I downloaded but when i go to mesh generator nothing will open. clicking file tab then settings not sure the paths are correct for navmesh path. I'll watch this video see if it explains what I'm doing wrong but most assume that users know how to navigate the computer far better then I do.
 
creepyoldude said:
yes I downloaded but when i go to mesh generator nothing will open. clicking file tab then settings not sure the paths are correct for navmesh path. I'll watch this video see if it explains what I'm doing wrong but most assume that users know how to navigate the computer far better then I do.
Click to expand...
if you downloaded the meshes, you should have every mesh in the game and shouldn't need to generate any in the mesh generator.

you would "generate" a mesh if you didn't have one, or were trying to make one with custom settings and such.

You would be better off just downloading the meshes via the updater and letting mq2nav use those
 
Sic said:
if you downloaded the meshes, you should have every mesh in the game and shouldn't need to generate any in the mesh generator.

you would "generate" a mesh if you didn't have one, or were trying to make one with custom settings and such.

You would be better off just downloading the meshes via the updater and letting mq2nav use those
Click to expand...
Sic thanks for your time sir.
 
brainiac said:
Walkable lets you cancel out an unwalkable area.. Like if you want to draw a large area as unwalkable and have a small part of it be walkable. Thats all.. It can't be used to create mesh out of thin air unfortunately.

Also, MQ2Nav has no knowledge of water volumes, I've been working on rewriting the zone parsing code but I've been busy with other endeavors and haven't finished it, unfortunately.
Click to expand...

I spent like 30 minutes making a ton of "walkable areas" in Bastion of Thunder towers only to find that it didn't do what I thought it was going to do. Is there anyway to force draw a mesh somehow for this instances? I know this has been a known issue after reviewing several forum posts but is there any way to fix this? I remember in one part of CWTN video he specifically toyed with BoT and got the towers meshed by adjusting settings but the the bottom floors were no longer meshed. I'm wondering if I could just create a mesh for the bottom, a mesh for the top, and then script a file replace in Windows depending on which area I am tackling?
 
ChatWithThisName said:


I made a video to hopefully help some users with the mesgenerator.exe found in the release folder create their own professional meshes with options most users don't even know exist.
Click to expand...



@ChatWithThisName I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you making this tutorial video! No doubt it's helped many people since it's original posting in 2018.

Editing navmesh files was something I kept intending to get around to, but I kept putting it off assuming it was going to be far more tedious than it ended up being. Last week, I started watching your tutorial hoping to at least get a preview of what all I'd be in for and instead I watched the entire thing and by the end of it was editing several navmesh files with confidence. You made a great video and explained things very well with helpful examples. Thank you for taking time out to create this for others!
 
I'm afraid that is a question for Brainiac. I was just providing a guide on how to use it (granted, it's a bit dated at this point and there are some newer features such as offmesh links that aren't mentioned). As for the sluggishness you experience with the mesh generator, you can also open debug.
1630858724806.png

Which, if you have a mesh opened already will give you the following options.
1630858779260.png

If you want to stop displaying the mesh itself, you can select "Input Mesh" or "Navmesh Invis"

Which can free up some resources to reduce the latency caused by the mesh generator, but also makes it so that you cannot see the blue mesh. You will still be able to see any marked areas.

You can also Select "Navmesh Trans" which makes the world zone itself transparent, and also can free up a lot of resources to remove latency, however then you can't see the world itself. If the mesh has already been built using the "build mesh" button, you would still be able to see the mesh, but not the zone itself.

As for the rest of the options, I'm not sure what they do. By default the setting would be as shown in the last screenshot "Navmesh" which would show both the world zone and the drawn mesh and any areas.
 
Thank you for those tips, that helped a lot. I really enjoy fine tuning the nav meshes to make sure my toons dont get stuck. I cant remember how I found it but somewhere I saw that there was a "pro" version. If it is a paid for version, please let me know. Thanks again.
 
There is no "pro" version, and anyone selling a "pro" version of nav is likely just trying to take you for your money and shouldn't be trusted. @brainiac is the developer and to my knowledge it's his intent that his plugin is available to everyone without a charge. But, if anyone were to speak on his behalf it would certainly be him. So I've tagged him in this response.
 
I see. That's the mesh updater, and not the Mesh Generator. To be clear, those are two different things.

1630957875766.png

When you click on that, you get this error. Fairly certain there isn't a mesh updater pro. Also, all those same meshes are the same as https://mqmesh.com/ the updater was provided to centralize the location that users could get meshes and simplify the download and get them to where they belong by including a button in the redguides launcher. These tools didn't exist when I made this video, and was one of the reasons I was trying to get creating meshes to something anyone could do. Certainly with the ability to download already created meshes it's simplified the process for users, but the video remains for those that still want to customize, or even improve the mesh repo so that they can continue to be improved upon.
 
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