Starspheres again…... dont say use search.
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I don’t understand the issue. Make a sphere, revert the surface normals, put a texture on it and make sure the UV is right, then export.
If you do it in 3ds Max it’s a 5 minutes process tops. Then you just need to merge the CMP and MAT together.
How the hell did you managed to have a 34mb CMP anyway?
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the texture itself is quite big 4096x2048, and tga format. :S
[EDIT]
im also not using max because i dont own it. im trying to use ms3d.I just tried again with a smaller texture size and it still didnt work.
make a sphere (im guessing its size isnt important because there are no transform options when i make it, so I just drag it until it fills the screen, it has 16 stacks and 16 slices)
Revert the surface normals.
which makes the inside of the sphere show the texture now.
export it as a CMP
export the MAT and add it to the CMP
then put it in the systems star sphere section here
go ingame see that it did nothing.
where am i going wrong.
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I feel your pain! I too found starspheres a hugely frustrating experience, you go through all the stages following the instructions and it still turns out cr*p!
I’d suggest you try importing your texture into a simple existing vanilla starsphere (perhaps EW01?) and see if it works.
Correct me if I’m wrong but your mod is based around airships and floating bases within atmosphere? (kinda like Laputa :)). So are you sure SS are the way to go? as you can never “reach” the stars or nebulae displayed in them, perhaps adding actual clouds (nebulae) to the system might be more realistic.
The existing SS use 256 X 256 pixels for MIP0, I used this size so I can’t comment on high resolution images but the process is very similar to creating large planets using CMP’s and I’ve used HD textures there successfully.
I created the 256 x 256 textures using Gimp and one stage in the process was to horizontally flip the image (I’m guessing it was because the texture was on the inside of the object).
This thread goes into a lot of detail on SS
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yea kinda like laputa, I do really like that movie.
maybe the game doesnt like the dimensions of the texture im using, but to map a sphere it needs to be twice as wide as it is tall.
maybe i could try cutting the texture in two pieces and putting each on half a sphere. I might try this.
And yes i know you cant reach the backgrounds, but the backgrounds are there to create the illusion of atmospheric flying.
It also creates a good sense of scale making the world feel much larger than if it was 3D rendered, there will be clouds added using freelancers nebulae as well as the background as well as flying stations and other nice things.
The game is set in the sky, so I feel have no need to render any ground at this moment in time.
Im thinking the capital of each nation would have rendered ground for the capital city, otherwise no ground will be rendered beyond a starsphere image.
[EDIT]
well i discovered that there is nothing wrong with my texture as it worked when i imported it into one of the image planes of ew01 like you said CK.
I just wonder why i cant get mine to work…
all it is is a sphere as FF pointed out so succinctly
:S
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Wow, that looks great!
I really hope you manage to make a working starsphere of it.Have you tried to put your texture on one of the spherical vanilla backgrounds?
That was the only thing that worked for me when I was investigating on this topic some time ago. Although my textures always were meant to tile up/down and left/right…
I never hat any luck exporting one myself, too. -
This is what I did with custom starspheres:
-Export the CMP from Milkshape as you did above.
-Export the MAT from Milkshape separately.
-Open the CMP in the UTF editor.
-Delete the Hardpoints node.
-Open the MAT in UTF editor.
-Copy the Material and Texture nodes into the CMP from the MAT.
-Save, reference in the system ini and test.The empty hardpoints node is usually what breaks the model.
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Just tried a few more things and it still didnt work, totally the most annoying process to ever be conceived
Quarks wrote:
Wow, that looks great!
I really hope you manage to make a working starsphere of it.Have you tried to put your texture on one of the spherical vanilla backgrounds?
That was the only thing that worked for me when I was investigating on this topic some time ago. Although my textures always were meant to tile up/down and left/right…
I never hat any luck exporting one myself, too.Thank you, you are seeing it with myself also for the first time ingame, I was very surprised, it looks fantastic.
I havent tried putting it on an existing sphere background yet, but like you said I may have to if i want my own star spheres, making one from scratch is turning out to be impossible.
Xalrok wrote:
This is what I did with custom starspheres:
-Export the CMP from Milkshape as you did above.
-Export the MAT from Milkshape separately.
-Open the CMP in the UTF editor.
-Delete the Hardpoints node.
-Open the MAT in UTF editor.
-Copy the Material and Texture nodes into the CMP from the MAT.
-Save, reference in the system ini and test.The empty hardpoints node is usually what breaks the model.
Can you show me one of yours in utf editor so i know what its supposed to look like. because i followed this to the letter and it still doesn’t work.
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I’m not sure if this is your real problem, but reversing the normals may be one difficulty.
If you uncheck “Draw Backfaces” in the 3D view panel, after you reverse the vertices the sphere should either become tansparent and you should see only the inside of it, or it will go black all over.
I think this alternative display is a small bug in Milkshape, one time it turned transparent, and the second time it went all black for me!
Anyway, checking this will help you to be sure it is done.
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FYI: I believe you could save that texture as a DDS. It’s non-square, but it’s a power of two, so it’ll work for just about every computer out there.
Even then, your texture doesn’t have a lot of high frequency data, so you could easily downsize it to 2048x1024 without losing much, I’d say.
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Layout of a working starsphere (starcube in this case)…
Normals must point inward, as in reversed face windings. Its been so long since I made one for FL can’t really help beyond showing one that I have in my mod that worked fine.
This one is a cube but it works exactly the same for a sphere.
Milshape is weird though, make sure all of the sliders are fully to the right (diffuse, ambient, specular etc) in the upper right corner.
Also your TGA must be 32 bit, not 24 bit.
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hm, the screenshots above with the image working have 24 bit tga.
also I use TGA because the quality is much much higher than dds in my experiance using the two over several years. though the file size is pretty substantial as a result, so its something i will have to look into again as i make more of them.
also I did put the file size down to 2048x1024 in the screens above, because i thought that maybe 4096x2048 might be a bit heavy for freelancer.
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I have identified a problem.
my sphere in ms3d before exporting is about 2 times larger than starsphere_li01.cmp 's sphere.
when i export it (no matter what the scale slide bar says) it is always about 100 times smaller than it should be.
how can i fix this? doesnt matter what i put the scale bar to it comes out 100 times smaller and completely useless. i only found this out when i accidentally opened HardCMP instead of UTF editor and loaded up the file and i had to scroll loads of times to be able to get it decent size in the window, and then i loaded up starsphere_br01.cmp, and found i had to scroll out, not in to get it in my window propperly.
so it turns out its not user error after all.
any help? :S
i have ms3d version 1.8.2 and cmp exporter V.03
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… Make the sphere 100 times larger in MS3D?
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Wasn’t there a bug with that exporter, where you have to save the settings then load them for the scale to be recognized? i.e. all you should have to do is: set the scale to 1 (and whatever other settings you need); Save Settings; Load Settings; Continue.
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Correct. As Adoxa says.
So probably your sphere has been working but is too small to see it.
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Bang on with that bug, you have to set your scale and save your settings before you export. As for getting a working starsphere exported I don’t envy you, I tried until I was blue in the face a while ago, in the end I gave up and pinched LS’s cube from solarus systems and substituted textures, with which I never had any problems. Good luck!
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does anyone have the latest exporter for the cmps then? i looked last night and search didnt turn up anything more than i already had without going through a endless forum thread.
[Edit]
because if I try to get around the bug by doing that loading settings thing, the model doesn’t appear at all anymore. -
FriendlyFire wrote:
… Make the sphere 100 times larger in MS3D?makes me kinda mad to say this, but.
this worked, this combined with everyones help meant i finally just now got the star sphere to work ingame.
I drew the sun onto the background and it looks weird here, so i think i’ll have to render the TGA again without the sun, perhaps move the camera so the perspective is above the mountains rather than on the same level as them.
what do you all think, I REALLY appreciate everyones help on this. once again another stumbling block discovered and overcome.
