Unfortunately you will need to use Milkshape. It is the only program with mostly complete importers/exporters for FL. There was an model pack somewhere at one time that contained all of them in max format, but I haven’t seen it in a long while.

If you need a specific model someone here might have it converted already.

Which CMP Importer plugin are you using?

if it is 2.7 then you need to select the materials (.mat file) manually, don’t let it use “Auto” to open the .mat file because that importer does often crash if you do. If it still crashes, change the options until you find a way, it will work well once you find out and disable the options that are causing the problem.

The original CMPImporter v0.1 by Mario Brito does not crash.

If all you want are quick and clean pictures of ships like this:

http://freelancercommunity.net/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=587

just use HardCMP.

recently here were some reports about milkshape 1.8.4. it does not interact well with some of the plug-ins. i am using 1.8.3 and it’s just fine if used properly.

Ok I will fool around with the options, but where are the textures .mat located?

If you import Liberty ships (e.g. ships\liberty\li_fighter\li_fighter.com), you will need the li_playerships.mat for the fighters and the li_capships.mat for capitals (e.g. ships\liberty\li_playerships.mat).

When you import a model, make sure your turn on the ‘import textures’ feature. This is done by selecting the mat file then finally importing the model. It will ask you where you want to store the textures, choose the same folder you intend on saving the model too.

As far as the Viper, maybe someone will provide you with the one they use…

FL uses dds and tga only. TGAs must be upside down to work properly in-game. These are stored in the mat file, normally not by themselves.

1; Check the settings in the 3D view, right click on the background and there are four options refering to the appearance, click “Textured”. (if it haven’t already done)

2; Extract the textures you can find on the material tab in UTF editor, simply export them, and add the proper name to each as you can see in the ship’s UTF material tree. Not a bad idea if both the textures and the model are placed in same folder. Save the ship’s ms3d file, if you got luck when you open it again they will appear on the model, otherwise you have to assign each on the material tab.

is there a grid turn off . I find the preferences and change grid to 0 but it remains.

Yes, right click on a view, and switch off “Show Grid”. In this window you can also find the axis off/on, projection, model appearance, and many more.

i had been struggling with milkshape and exporting the models to obj files (with textures)

ive worked it out with some help

ive not used gmax, does it import obj files if it does then it should work but youll need to edit the obj mtl file (when you export as obj 2 files get created, the model (obj) and the texture/material files (mtl))

if you edit the mtl file youll see each section has numbers then the line where the material is pointed to, only thing is not a lot of programms can read dds files (freelancer material files)

so they need converting to png 1st

then edit the line in the mtl change the .dds to.png resave making sure you save as .mtl then should work

here a render of a shire i did

shire