CMP to SUR Conversion Tests

Bullwinkle wrote:

Bejaymac wrote:
so the idea of possibly spending weeks learning how to get a CMP & SUR to work right is a non starter for most.

Oooh. That explains my experience.

So, now that you have completed your two years of learning how to make good SURs, Bejay… is it possible to explain in a tutorial? Or is it like asking a hacker how to hack (impossible to teach)?

It was on the old Lancers Reactor, so it should be in the archive, it might even be on here as I can’t remember if I posted it here after the site went live (that gives some idea just how long I’ve been making SURs ;)). You are correct in that I can teach how it’s done, just not how to apply it to each mesh, that’s trial & error even for me. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve regrouped a mesh then exported it into a CMP, only to find when building the mesh for the SUR that the grouping wouldn’t work, and end up scrapping the CMP and redoing it with the new grouping.

@ adoxa, please don’t use the source code for V1.2 as even Colin will tell you it’s crap, it has a lot of bugs that just weren’t there in the v1.1, biggest one being it doesn’t make hitboxes properly.

Well…

I moved on from testing boxes to testing spheres since in the last test one of two spheres was missed. (The second was a Geosphere and was sur’d OK though).

This is a TOTAL failure:-

In a 2-sphere, 1-cylinder model only the cylinder is sur’d.

Somehow it seems the builder has either missed both spheres completely, or it has decided the shape is already done but has not saved it…

Here’s the screen shot below.

Please: someone else do this test and give us your findings:-

Make the two spheres and one cylinder, add a material, export the cmp, and make the surs with sur builder, and import them back into Milkshape, select the surs only and print your screen.

Then please remove the surs, add two Geospheres, export and gen the surs again with sur builder, mport, select the surs only, print your screen.

It only takes 10 minutes to do all of this.

Let us see your results please.

Thanks.

i can do it tonight

Thanks Mirkha.

Guys, I feel I need to put down my outlook here for you all to understand what I am looking for in this project…

I am familiar with making surs by hand. Probably more than many of the greater modders. I have spent many months making bad ones and eventually succeeding, and even when I succeeded, not even being able to see why a certain one succeeded when its predecessors failed, since the model and method was identical in many cases.

I have manually made convex shrouds for sur-splicer, and later when we found they existed, I have used 3DS Max with Havoc tools and got very good results. Yes some missed welds did cause problems, but other times I needed to reshape a ship part entirely, or turn some face edges, but it’s obvious when a shape is not right and it needs fixing, so not problem. Now we have the Convex tool for MilkShape and that is pretty good although not 100%. Note there are two of them, one is not quite as reliable as the other.

Then Sur Builder comes along and it is capable of making convex shrouds for individual cmp groups. WOW!!! FAB1!

I can split my own models very well and very easily.

So I figure, if Sur Builder can make a convex shroud for each cmp group in a cmp file, then I can make all the cmp groups that I need in the right place,the right size and the right shape, including the weapon hardpoints, equipment hardpoints, weapon+wings, and so on.

And then, if Sur Builder does its bit, all it has to do is locate each cmp group, shroud it, and save it, move on to the next, until all the cmp groups have a shroud (sur part). FAB2!

And last of all, wouldn’t it be FAB3 if Sur Builder had a button that said: “Shield Bubble”!? All that has to do is take a sphere, and very simply squash it to the size of the whole model’s maximum diameters+1metre in each axis X, Y, Z. Or +2 metres so we can have 1m above & below, sideways & fore-and-aft!

Done!

We wouldn’t need any magic, only these functions.

Then we won’t need more work on an exporter or other, since the tool can be as beginner or as complex as the user wants it. For me, I will use it to add HpWeapon hardpoints and so on to make as close to a vanilla sur as I can. Just because I can, and because it is so quick!

Others will make a simpler 3-group model or a 1-group model with shield bubble and will be so happy with it too!

And for my dreadnoughts of 2,000 to 3,000 metres with claws, booms and beams and extended hulls, it will make hull-following surs without blinking - all I will have to do is break my model into sensible parts and the sur shapes will follow them!

My Crab will have sur parts following its booms, not filling in the gaps.

So the tool is not only for beginners, is it. All of us need it, perhaps more now that I have explained how I will use it.

Unless you want to call me a beginner too - I’ve been called worse!

So - I’m trying to find out which shapes the builder doesn’t like. But sadly, so far it’s not only my model’s right wing tip (actually it is not the model since the identical left tip generated fine!) but also boxes, and spheres, and fat triangles (like Pizza slices, triangles with thickness).

The more I investigate the more basic shapes are failing.

That is what I am trying to isolate but since it’s more than one shape it must be a fundamental problem.

Complex, nook-and-cranny ones like the hull and the wing roots generated fine, even when they were NOT WELDED, and even with gaps between vertices that were supposed to be one!

So - the weld theory is blown out of the water too, Sur Builder deals with that exceedingly well and no fix is needed for that at all!

All we need it to do is to stop skipping some cmp groups.

It MUST be easy to find the cause once we know what to look for and what model will reproduce it - now we do know!

From LS’s comment it could be the Duplicate Radius, but I doubt it, I tried values of 0.01, 0.1, 1, 2, 5, and 10. The bigger the number the more obvious was the effect of combining vertices, below 1 it didn’t show much difference so I left it at 1 for the remaining tests.

By the way, is sur builder’s “1” the same as a MilkShape “1” unit, approximately 1 metre scale for FL ships?

I’ll be back!

BW: you need to get MilkShape and the importers and exporters please, so you can make some simple shapes and help us to help you to troubleshoot. It’s really not hard and is compulsory to fix this problem.

StarTrader wrote:
BW: you need to get MilkShape and the importers and exporters please, so you can make some simple shapes and help us to help you to troubleshoot. It’s really not hard and is compulsory to fix this problem.

As I read through your last two posts, ST, I began to think that you and I should sit down over a pint and have you show me how to do some of these things so that I could run my own tests.

Great minds think alike, eh?

Now that is a scary thought!

hm, milkshape is a primitive modeling tool. most actions are very obvious and to do even quicker than with many other programs, although not nearly as accurate.

oh yes … milkshape is a very simple tools but maybe not really easy to “take in hands” because the interface is awfull ; my opinion ^^

but i think in maybe 10 min ST can teach you all you need to know in order to make simples cmp

@Bejaymac: Unless you have the source to 1.1, I have little choice (I think it’d still be better to use 1.2 than start from scratch).

can’t you decompile the plug-in to a programming language? or even use your assembly magic?

adoxa wrote:
@Bejaymac: Unless you have the source to 1.1, I have little choice (I think it’d still be better to use 1.2 than start from scratch).

I found two posts from Louva-Deus that suggest that the 1.2 code is a failed experiment, but the eoa.seriouszone.com main page is not working right now, so I could not investigate further:

I really should take down the 1.2 version files, they don’t create valid SUR files anyway. You should stick to 1.1. The new version in the works is based on 1.1.

It is the plugin. 1.1 and 1.2 use two different methods of creating the SUR file. This was an experiment Colin did.

I’ve made a request to Louva for the v1.1 source, hopefully he’ll see it soon and say yes.

http://forums.seriouszone.com/showthread.php?53423

guess what, it would be great, if all of these gods out there from good old times were reunited here, on the starport. not the only one but the very freelancer community it shall become. don’t you think we’d be a lot faster if all together?

i think i have the 1.1 sources

here : msSurimporter1.1

Well done Mirkha.

Gisteron: Are you sure you want them here? Don’t forget they are all older and grumpier too…!

That is the **Im**porter. But nice try.

ST: Any chance you can get the FLMM source while you are at it?

oh ?
sorry -__-

/me go out

edit :

@ ST :

all here

i’ve done several tests

so, 2 sphere and a box, no way to generate a entire sur
the more i can do is a sphere + the box, or 2 spheres

and it’s weird because the sur builder seems to generate all the 3 shapes but it’s not show in hardcmp …

for example, Type1 general allways the box and not the spheres

here the best result with Type2 :

as you can see the second sphere is generated in the sur builder but not seen in hardcmp

Bullwinkle wrote:

ST: Any chance you can get the FLMM source while you are at it?

I’ll ask, I think it’s Matthew Leider’s? Don’t know if he was in EOA?

Mirkha wrote:

… as you can see the second sphere is generated in the sur builder but not seen in hardcmp

Good work, Mirkha, many thanks. I import the surs into MilkShape because the HardCMP display is not always clear.

In your file the shapes that are generated are there - it’s just the red colour you chose for the material, it obscures the sur wires, but in my HardCMP v1.8 it shows as pink, see below…

Well I too have noticed that the outer shroud in the sur builder display seems to always cover the whole model, but we can’t see if the missing parts are being generated and not saved perhaps -

BW, is it fairly easy to put a line in that prints the name of each cmp group as soon as it is found? Or even just a counter that is printed, if we see the cmp groups are all being found, (or not) it will give us a good starting point.

Thanks.

the first screen shows that although the surbuilder have “draw” the two spheres and the box, the result is only one sphere and the box
as shown on the milkshape import

it’s like the sur builder make the second sphere but don’t export it …

StarTrader wrote:
I’ll ask, I think it’s Matthew Leider’s? Don’t know if he was in EOA?

Yes. I sent Matt an email but got no response. Apparently he has left the scene. Somebody that I spoke with mentioned that Louva Deus might have a copy, and I have not gotten around to asking because I have my hands full with other stuff.

However, since you already initiated a conversation with Louva, FLMM is in seriously need of an overhaul. The SUR Builder is the kind of thing that a few modders will use a few times, but everybody uses FLMM. And most have trouble with it in one way or another.

BW, is it fairly easy to put a line in that prints the name of each cmp group as soon as it is found? Or even just a counter that is printed, if we see the cmp groups are all being found, (or not) it will give us a good starting point.

Why an immediate display? No matter… the main request is for a result report, and I will put that on the list to investigate.

Doesn’t need to be, could be in a log file or whatever is easiest as a tracing tool.

Actually I meant programmatically speaking, as in the next line of code! lol

Thinking about it a log may be best if we need more tracking output later to get closer to the problem.