Help needed with custom ship

Davis wrote:
Yeah, because you answered my question i wanted to ask while i was writing my post. k
So my last question is the scale.
What was the last setting in cmp export and in fl model tool?

It would have been the default settings, my hardpoints are all in the right place but the ship is flying it the 90 degrees clockwise instead.

the placing of my hardpoints looks like the right scale but is obviously wrong.

Davis wrote:]

thats not good… ok:
first you have to turn your entirely model anticlockwise 90 degrees in milkshape, ctrl+a, rotate y -90, and then still assigned your model, move/ absolute x,y,z= 0 (very important in cmp the ship must be appears in the front!!!)

in regard you wrote i suspect you havent used flmodel_tool, what is necessary, to put that ship in game properly.
if you dont know this great prog then download the version 1.0a beta 6 simply open your cmp in that and scale up to 25 at first then save, open its sur, if it is orig then rescale it to ship/automatic, if its custom then first ship and after scenery, save it and thats all.

done the whole resize, definitely not that, just made my hard points further away from my ship and the collision corresponds with that,

am i right in saying it must be the .mat thats not working correctly?

Davis wrote:
could be then. so you renamed the vanila textures if im right, and put them on your ship… have you modified anything? color, hue etc… if they are in tga format yet, then convert them to dds as Xarian mentioned.
i have no more idea, do the texture names matching with the material names in milkshape?

What i didnt read, do the textures appear in cmp?

I renamed the vanilla texture yes.

put them on my ship yes.

modified anything i.e color…. no

.tga format? yes*

texture name match with materials in milkshape yes.

do the texture appear in hcmp? never thought to check it and just makes the ship a dark colour…there could be my problem…

think i’m gonna start a fresh from the importing into milkshape stage, thanks for the help davis and prime, just need to learn a bit more on .mat creation as everything else “seemed” to work…

Davis wrote:
wait with that.
first check the textures in cmp, click “w”
if you got dark color without textures then you have problem with the mat, there is no reason to redo your ship again.
first dds convert, swap the textures in milkshape to the dds formats with same name, mat exporter again, check your cmp, if you got textured model thats a good start.

ok ok, will do, quick question (probably a nooby one) how do i convert to dds, google isnt helping at all

Xarian_Prime wrote:
“Paint.net” & there’s a dds progy somewhere here i think in the downloads if that fails to work with dds (it should convert easily just save as)

Davis wrote:

how much i love this day… vga memo off, im off, shop almost off…

heres an other:
http://www.filefront.com/3577988/DDS-Converter-2-1.0/

converted the dds and exported my .mat……it worked! finally some progress.

only thing wrong with it now is the ships upside down and orientated the wrong way…i know how to fix that though, thanks to davis, oh and the sur is crazy it makes me collide with planet after venturing a little distance from the docking ring…probably to do with it not being custom .sur.

Thanks prime and davis, helping others is re-warding in its own way.

Xarian_Prime wrote:
hehe… no worries

& yer… its quite amusing flying upside down & engines first, i’m pretty sure we’ve all done that during the first few attempts 8-)

so easy to forget to flip the ship just before export… few more things…

always center your 0
ship should face “you” in front view & down in topview

for .sur’s grab the “FLModelTool10ab6” to re-size any existing .sur (& ye ship as well if needed) or try “FL_Sur_Builder_0002” both good proggys and easy to use.

oh and… Paint.net is good to get a grasp on texture manipulation & exportation… but the mighty Gimp is vastly superior if your looking further at this task… but for simple conversion & export Paint is pretty awesome… just dont try anything fancy with .dds (alpha channels mainly) in Paint as it wont save the data right… that’s what gimps for

been using model tool to resize…took a few attempts but i got it right in the end, ive been using paint for my textures saving as .tga and then converting using dds converter, that got annoying with the whole “cannot convert not a multiplier of two”, but i finally got a ship that works now even if it has got a shield thats on fire.

Davis wrote:
I forgot to tell, when you export from ms3d to cmp the settings are:

orientation: back to front
model type: ship
scale down: 92 (default)
level of detail: level 0

heres a tutorial made by frozen, how to make custom hitboxes, you can see the proper ship orientations on the pics:
http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=30770

post#2

thanks for the link, looks like good stuff, ill start that soon.

i used the upside down orientation instead of back to front and the rest of default, i only put one group in as that part confused me but i don’t seem to have any side effects as of yet, so all is good.

adoxa wrote:
I’d suggest SurResizer to resize surs, FLMT doesn’t quite do it right. Updating FLMT is something else I’ve yet to get around to.

Ok ill use that instead, thanks

StarTrader wrote:
Just for the record - sometime ago I imported the pilot model and a vanilla ship into MS3D and always make my new ships to the same scale as those. I often use the pilot to get the scale right if I’m not sure.

Then when I export I always set the scale to ‘1’ - but remember to SAVE Settings - if you don’t, then the export plugin has a bug and it will still scale the ship down to 1/92 even though the scale shows ‘1’!

I wondered why when I exported the model, it was so tiny, I got into a routine of resizing with the model tool, but knowing the bug with the plug in will save me time in the future. Thanks,

one quick question…. why is there like a flame coming from my ship shield hard point, ignore the massive gap between the hardpoints and the ship and the rubbish texture i haven’t finished yet, i just want to make a non buggy custom ship.

Quarks wrote:

Scale_Boy wrote:
i only put one group in as that part confused me but i don’t seem to have any side effects as of yet, so all is good.

Those part settings in the cmp-exporter have to do with components of the model (e.g. wings that con be blown off). If you export as a 1-part-model, the ship just is not able to blow up into pieces. If you want to export with multiple parts, you have to group your model in milkshape first.

Thanks, that clears up what I thought it did (although I wasn’t 100%)

I wish people who knew the stuff would add there knowledge to the modding handbook on this site so people don’t have to second guess everything, would help me learn a lot faster and with a lot less crashes