Modeling and Texturing

Nope!
UTF Editor 3.0 and adoxa’s Freelancer XML project with w0dk4’s tutorial !
However, last thing I need to make (wireframe) will need 3ds max for hitbox model.

P.S. tnx Huor, this was round 200 logins/outs.

could I get these in .obj form?
good for Homeworld 2 modding….

39kb and 37kb are my results. Nothing to worry about. The Rheinland Battleship I made in the Tutorial had 87kb, and its convex model doesn’t have as much polygons as you may expect for a ship in that size.

Oh and I think it’s not good to make a shield bubble like vanilla did it on the ships. For players, HpMount will never get deactivated so you will ever collide with the bubble and not the shiphull itself. But of course, you can do it however you want.

Blodo wrote:
What about the 3dsmax exporter then? I heard that can export groups properly. Any chance where I can get a compiled release?

http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?post_id=49801#forumpost49801

Sushi wrote:
W0dk4’s and SilentAssassins tool allows you to place the model you wish into the .cmp directly with no fuss or fiddling. It’s great.

Sry for ask - but explained how anywhere?

Found it!

Please don’t post the same thing twice. Thanks.

Well, I’ve been fooling around with this for, well, years by now, so I guess I’m going to ask you to help me out directly, for I guess I’m out of luck.

I’ve been looking for a way to get planetary surfaces into FL in an actually working manner. Visibility problems can mostly be solved by adjusting some values in the EXE, but I’ve mostly been out of luck with the surface file. I’ve been looking for a somewhat reliable automation for planetary surface creation, so it might not be 100% form fitting, but getting it to work would be a good start.

If any of you can get this working for me, and tell me how they did it, I guess I’d owe you all a cake or two.

And just so that I’ll give something in return as well:
An excellent toy to play with - Hierarchical Approximate Convex Decomposition.
https://code.google.com/p/hacd/
Go to source and do an svn checkout on the address provided (using for example TortoiseSVN). You will get a working application.

Well, here is the topic of my years-long despair:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34513151/Terr.zip
Any help appreciated 🙂

I just print to the pdfFactory printer - easy peasy.

Emmanuel wrote:
Thanks. Good to know because I was planning on using Maya. I will check out 3DS Max

Is there anything you need to keep in mind while modelling? I read in other threads that you should avoid certain kinds of polygons (convex?)

What about the model itself? Does it have to be one piece or is it okay if consists of several smaller pieces?

You (everyone) should make all ship models in more than one piece (Group).

No, your individual model pieces don’t have to be convex, they can be any shape. Only sur file pieces must each be convex.

This is because collision detection is only possible by using completely convex surs, any concave part in a sur file will prevent it from detecting collisions. So unless your ship cmp model is already convex everywhere, this will not be easy. to do in one piece.

We use manual methods and tools like ConvexTool and Havok Contents Tools’ Convex Hull modifier to make convex shrouds for each model piece, and then use those convex shapes to generate the sur files.

To make each part of a sur file convex while keeping close to the model body shape, may need many sur parts, and if you have only a few model parts (in the cmp file) then you will not have enough model parts for each sur part to connect with, because each sur part must have the same name as an existing model part.

This is why in the past, modellers and sur file creators added zOhMyGodBayxx01 dummy groups into the model cmp files, because the ship model was often in a single piece or only a couple of pieces.

So it’s best to create the hull in one or more pieces, making another piece where the model outline naturally changes direction or shape is best, for example where a straight hull piece joins a fatter or thinner hull piece, or turns out at an angle.

Then make your wings, fins, pods, engines, booms etc each as a separate piece (called “groups” in MilkShape and in most tutorials), myship_Hull_Front, myship_Hull_Mid, myship_Hull_Rear, myship_LeftWing, myship_RightWing, myship_LeftEngine01, myship_LeftEngine02, myship_RightEngine01, myship_RightEngine02 etc.

In many cases I have made even one engine in several pieces - intake, grill, body, exhaust and nozzle,and maybe even side decals - this is very useful in putting in design features because you can paint each piece in a separate solid colour, instead of adding a texture file that has to be stretched to fit and shows wrinkles in places.

You can also make sculptured body detail pieces and add them as separate groups too.

But remember the maximum number of groups per cmp is 18 unless you know how to splice cmp files together, there is a good tutorial for that.

But you can make several model parts and the exporter can make them into one group. For instance the separate engine body, intake, nozzle, decals etc can be made into 1 group.

It takes a bit of trial and error but I got very nice looking results, and it’s very gratifying.

Just ask if you have problems, and many people here can help.

In addition to UTF editor, which is awesome for importing/exporting dds and tga files, you may eventually find yourself wanting to change things that don’t have a mat file, but instead have the textures loaded in the .cmp file itself. For this, I suggest “Freelancer XML Project” which will allow you to basically decompress the files you want to tinker with, spitting out xml files (can also extract images and audio clips from files by checking the options in the program).

Example: I wanted to create new thumbnail icons for ship vendor for my new ships… I got the images taken of the ships, put them in 64x64, but could not find the .mat files associated. After decompressing the .3db file, I opened the .xml output and found the image the .3db used. Selecting “extract images” from the XML Project program, I was able to extract and replace the image. After a little editing of the .xml file, I was ready to recompile/compress the contents back into a .3db file with a new name (all values in .xml changed as well as image name changed). After compiling the .3db back together, I now have my icon thumbnails for my added ships…

FreelancerXMLProject has been very useful for much more than just texturing as well… but just covering where you’re starting…

Also, if you do adjust your textures to allow transparency, system light color does not alter the appearance of your ship as greatly as if it were solid w/ no transparency.

Hidamari wrote:
2. How do i also do transparency?
i only know that PNG has transparency as part of it? :?

Saw this covered on page one, in a different way… The previous method mentioned is what you want to do in order to make specific sections of the ship transparent by using alpha channels. This method I used actually makes the entire texture semi-transparent. Also, I used photoshop, so these instructions will be for photoshop.

Start with the image you want to make transparent, copy and paste to a new template w/ a transparent background.

Before you paste your image into this new window, add a new layer. This should give you two layers, both empty and the workspace should still be transparent.

Paste the image into the top layer, leaving the bottom layer empty.

Select the area you want to make transparent, change opacity to desired level (I used 60%) and with the area still selected, right click and “save selection”. You will have to name the selection… I typically go w/ trans or transparency to make it easy in identifying the selection for the next step.

After saving selection, you have to tie it to the image still. Go to the “Select” menu and then “Load Selection”. This is where you select the name of the selection you saved in step 4. (Note: You should still have the image selected while doing this, it may work without selecting it, but as I stick with what works, I never de-selected my image till I was ready to save.)

After loading the selection, check the channels tab to make sure your selection is below the RGB channels.

Save as 32 bit TGA file.

When importing a tga into a mat or txm file, you may have to delete the MIPS node and add a MIP0 node that you will import the TGA file to. MIPS is for DDS files, TGA files use a MIP# system where 0 is the largest image and 8 is typically the smallest. It’s not necessary to load up all 8 mipmaps, I’ve always been able to get away with just MIP0. The last thing to mention about working with TGA’s is if it was a DDS extracted from a mat or txm file, you will need to flip the image vertically otherwise the mapping will be messed up.

Edit:
You can also map textures to the glass/cockpit window if you want… of course, you will need to make an image for the glass to be mapped to.

Using UTF editor, open the .mat file for the ship and in texture, add a node and name it whatever… for this example, I’ll use “sp_glass”.

Once you have the node for “sp_glass”, you need to make a node under it for the MIPS or MIP0 (dds vs tga) and import the image.

Under Material library, you should also have a glass node there. Just to be thorough, I actually named this “sp_glass” as well.

The default for glass has the following nodes:
Type: DcDtOcOt
Dc: stores RGB? values for color of glass, the ? represents a value I have not figured out what it does, these values are also displayed on individual lines, so Red value is first line, Green value is second line, Blue value is third line… mystery value is fourth line. (These values can be found in “int array” of “Interpret data as…” section)
Oc: Never touched this when recoloring glass… don’t know what this value is, possibly the level of transparency?

You need to remove these nodes and create the following nodes:
Type: (String Value = DcDt)
Dt_name: (String Value = name of your image to map to glass)
Dt_flags: Not entirely sure what this does, I just copied the @ in string value that seems consistent with all the other mapped nodes.

Now your sp_glass in material_library should point to your dds/tga MIPS/MIP0 in the texture library for sp_glass. As long as they’re linked correctly, your glass will now be textured. You can follow the above process to make the textured glass semi-transparent.

Also should point out that if you do decide to make the entire ship transparent to any degree, you may want to change the value for pilot in the shiparch.ini… I just dropped the ‘s’ and changed mine to:
DA_archetype = equipment\models\pilot\hip_pilot.3db

This causes the game to not render a pilot… otherwise you would see a non-transarent pilot… unless you wanted to also make the pilot semi-transparent, in which case I’d use a lower opacity than the rest of the texture files…

You know you can use the selection editor and tile texture in combination with the tex coordination editor it’s good. But Khed 3D is better to UVmap object and it can load Milkshape models, you can do cylenderical or spherical maps. It is realy easy to use. And you aren’t obligated to do Tools/Extend primitivs to have torus.

Collada format works good, so does fbx…

Thaddeus wrote:

Generate the xml files with the utf-xml tool (adoxas version)

Ha! I wish I could do that, but UTFXML doesn’t work on my present configuration 😞 In the windows event logger (I forgot how it’s called exactly) I saw some references to ‘architecture not supported’ or something like it… The rising tide of incompatibilty that’s threatening us 😞 Not everybody seems to be suffering of it though. So it can also be my lack of expertise with Win7.

I do have an older machine running XP, and I hope UTFXML runs on that one. I made my XML-SDK on my girlfriend’s laptop, running Vista, but it has become buggy (not to mention it has only two USB slots, one of them broken and the other mortally wounded)

Btw Thaddeus - great tutorial you wrote here!!

HardCMP does not map Ctrl+S and disregards modifier keys, so Ctrl+S triggers S and that’s it.

Happy days!

Quarks wrote:
There is a control to make the hp’s middle touch the model, just control-click the point where you want the hp to be

Good to know, thanx!

Hello Moonhead,

Do what ever your more comfortable with. It’s what I do.

I meant it as a replacement for the first one (v2.7), but Milkshape doesn’t seem to mind having both at the same time. I wrote v2.7 to work with an exporter that I have long since lost the source code for. The new importer I wrote to work with my new exporter but still support the old hard point naming convention by ‘HCL’.

If you use and find it useful, let me know.

Timmy51m wrote:

You know when you use the cmp importer there’s a tab you can check which allows you to choose whether you import hardpoint info or not right?

yeah you told me so but I was already working on a model.

Weird mixed result, as to my present (above-described) project:

overall fine: ships work fine the lightest fighter rendered a crash on launch not all the weapon hps I made, showed up. Shall go thru them tomorrow.

Oh really?
I’ll try it with the next ship, thanks.