A Basic SUR for a Basic CMP
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As most of you will know getting SURs to work for the custom ships is problematic to say the least, most players don’t like the resized SURs as they don’t fit very well. Making a custom SUR work has proven a nightmare for most of you, that’s because most of the custom models will never work with a custom SUR, neither the CMP nor the SUR have been constructed in the way Freelancer needs them to have been constructed.
As the majority of the models won’t work with a custom SUR we are left with only one option, resizing, * listens for the groans * , yes I know everybody complains about how bad they fit, but unless you want to rebuilt every model in a way FL will accept and then build a SUR model for each ship (I’m a masochist and even I’m not stupid enough to take that on), you really have no choice. However we will not be resizing ship SURs as we already know they don’t fit quite right, but there are plenty of other SUR types we can use.
Step One
Open the CMP you want a SUR for in Hardcmp, now start to load in the vanilla Fighter & Freighter SURs, you however are not looking to see how good a fit the ship part of the SUR is, but rather how close in shape the shield bubble is to your ship. Once you have a bubble that’s close enough for you head to the game directory for that ship, in it you will see a SUR that ends “_shield”, copy it to the same folder as your CMP and rename it to match.
Step Two
Now it’s time for FlModelTool, load in the CMP and you should see something like this -
If the settings in the two circled areas are different then you will need to save (overwrite it) the CMP and then load it back in again, other wise the SUR will be resized at the old values. Now load in the SUR you’ve just copied over and click on the “resize” button, a small window will open that looks like the picture on the left -
Set it up so it looks like the picture on the right, the important part here is to make sure you change it from a type 2 or 3 (they vary) to a type 4 other wise it won’t work. Click “Ok” and then “yes” on the little ‘confirm’ pop-up, now “save” it by overwriting the original.
Leave FlModelTool open for the moment.Step Three
Now it’s time to see if the SUR is a close enough fit for you, open the CMP in Hardcmp and load in the SUR, if it covers your ship so that your ‘happy’ with it then your finished. If it’s to big/small then you need to manually adjust the scale in FlModelTool (now you see why I said leave it open ;)), the scaling has 2 manual setting, “scale all” scales the XYZ by the same amount, while you can use different sizes for XYZ with “scale individually”. The scale is similar to milkshape, in that 1 means no change, 0.9 is smaller while 1.1 is larger, adjust the SUR a little, save it, check it in Hardcmp & repeat until your happy with it.
This is far from perfect as there are some ship shapes that will make you an easier target, something like the Andromeda Ascendant which has large empty spaces that are now covered with a SUR.
Before I forget, this method will also work better for those of you who use a primitive shape as your SUR, as there’s less empty space to hit like this.
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Bj i love you
;D
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I once read somewhere that you can build a SUR out of lots of triangles, making the correct mesh, which allowed you could add holes, such as the Shipyards in NY where you could fly through the Scaffolding, in the SUR file and then splice them all together, it requires a lot of time to export every triangle separately, but the overall results were amazing with a perfectly fitting SUR file, is that what you mean by a correctly structured SUR file?
