Documentation Overview
What does Apathy do? It translates 3DMF models into Myth 2 tags. It also edits attributes that are important to Myth 2's engine.
What doesn't Apathy do? It will not edit textures or model geometry. It can't be used to make a model. There are other tools that do this, some of them are shareware or even free.
There is one feature notably missing from Apathy's functionality, and it's an advanced one. The ability to make model permutations. This may get added in at a later date.
In the meantime, Vegas can be used to supplement this feature. Vegas is an unreleased Bungie tool that can do the full range of Myth 2 model editing. Since it's unreleased by Bungie, I can neither tell you where to get it or what to do with it if you did have it. You'll just have to scratch and figure it out for yourself. However making a model permutation is only useful for about 1% of the time, and there are ways around it that don't involve Vegas.
It's a good idea to get yourself equipped. Skip ahead to the Other tools section and grab the stuff you'll need to make models. Familiarize yourself with those tools first and read their documentation. The ones I'm recommending all have good documentation for what they do.
Throughout the course of this tutorial I'll try and discuss good techniques for making low poly scenery, the kind that Myth likes to eat.
History of Apathy
You never know, someone might be interested in the history of Apathy's development. I'll expound on that a bit.
Eli Curtz has been reverse engineering Myth code since TFL was in beta. By the time Myth 2 was released, there were finally some decent official tools. But one thing very noticably absent was model editing. Eli set out to reverse engineer Vegas itself, make it Mac friendly, using standards Mac users can deal with.
Vegas ended up in Vista's hands (as it did for other mapmaker groups) in a completely undocumented state. Almost nobody had the patience to try and figure out how it worked, it just appeared to be completely broken and backwards in it's design. Needless to say, the learning curve on Vegas is harsh. It can be a challenge for some people just to get it to launch.
So here was Eli's goal in a nutshell: Understand Myth's model code, reverse engineer Vegas, and make the new editor easy to use and bug free.
Vista had Apathy working in the infant stages some time ago and used it sparingly for just a few projects, but it was very incomplete. It only had the ability to translate certain 3DMF's to Myth tags, but not set attributes on those tags. Without a GUI that would let you set the attributes on the tags, the models would be broken or nonfunctional in Myth. So to do anything with it, somebody had to learn Vegas. A few Vistans took on the challenge of figuring it out, and what we know about Myth 2 models today is based on what we figured out an inch at a time.
We never had any contact with Bungie on this issue. It's fair to assume that Bungie has enough going on without lending help to community editors. However we never thought that we couldn't do it ourselves.
While making Jinn, Apathy got used more and Vegas got used less as time went on. The final set of models were made using only Apathy. Speaking as someone who has used both tools extensively, Apathy is a dream to use. Making a complex model still has it's own set of difficulties, but Apathy made one phase of the total process alot easier to deal with.
I think Eli and the Vista group have alot to be proud of in Apathy. It's been my pleasure to write the documentation for it.
Links Index
Pages 2-4 cover the use of Apathy. Pages 5-6 cover
the model making process in detail. Page 7 takes you
to where you need to get more goodies.Page 1 - Documentation Overview
Page 3 - Touched by a triangle
Page 4 - Affecting mesh cells and vertices
Page 5 - Making a simple model