Star Trek Mod (Division of Labor?)

[Drake113]

Originally posted by Cleeve:
Bridge commander models cannot be imported because there is no import plug in for them, unfortunately.

Not sure about homeworld models.

Right, there's no importer for 3ds Max, but Milkshape will import Bridge Commander, Homeworld and even Armada models if you use the plugin from Assimilation Software ( http://www.assimsoft.com/) -- at least that's what the import menu says. So, you could import the model into Milkshape, then export it as a .3ds file, and then open it in 3dsMax.

[General Woundwort]

Many thanks for the tips. I'll be busy in RL issues until tomorrow afternoon, but I'll give these recommendations a try and see what I can come up with...

[Atrocities]

I have a ton of star trek models and meshes someplace. I can look for them, but I think they are on the HD of my dead p2 400. Any one want to donate $200.00 bucks to help me get it going again, I could then burn a disk and send it to you if the data is still intact.

[Suicide Junkie]

What kind of damage are you talking?
If the harddrive and files are intact, can you not just yank it out and plug it into another case?

[General Woundwort]

Good news - I got the programs Drake mentioned, and started to work on a ship - namely the Miranda class Fed cruiser (the good ship "Reliant" from Wrath of Khan).

Bad news - Drake, what did your BG model look like at this stage?

Originally posted by Drake113:
Now, open the .3ds model in Lithunwrap, select the individual Groups, and move them around and scale them until all the Groups fit in the large gray box on your screen.

I'll tell you, for the Miranda it looked like a plate of angular spaghetti, or maybe the wiring diagram for a HAL 9000. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, much less shrink *all* of the parts down and fit them onto that one screen.

If this is "normal", I may have to contract out the ship modeling portion of the mod, as I am still lightyears behind in just coding the campaign, and doing the ships would take forever.

[ November 02, 2003, 13:57: Message edited by: General Woundwort ]

[Drake113]

No, it's sorta supposed to look that way initially. You don't even want to know how scary the Andromeda Ascendant was when I started this endeavor; that's the reason I shelved the Andromeda mod right off the bat and went for Battlestar Galactica instead.
Ok, you should have a menu bar down the right side with the following stuff:
+ Groups
+ Materials
Bones

Click on the + next to Groups. Then, right click on the first group, click "Select", then Edit>Scale>Arbitrary>.5x>Close. This will scale down the selected group to half size. Now, move it somewhere out of the way, right click the group again, and click "Unselect". Repeat for the rest of the Groups.
Ok, now that you've scaled down your respective Groups, the next trick is to get them all to coexist in that gray box without overlapping. Ideally, you want to make them as big as possible so you'll get the most amount of detail out of your texture.
Now, delete all the stuff under materials and save it as an XFile. Now click File>UV Map>Save and name it something like miranda.bmp. This is BMP of a wireframe representation of your ship, and this is what you'll be applying your textures to in your trusty image editor. Open it along with the other BMP files in the that directory (for the Miranda, it's the FCL directory and you'll want to open FCL_1_1.bmp, FCL_1_2.bmp, FCL_1_3.bmp, and FCL_1_4.bmp. you can ignore the rest as they are all either damage maps, light maps, or lower resolution). Now scale those BMPs so they fit over the proper parts of your UV Map (miranda.bmp). Once you're convinced it looks OK, scale the UV Map to 256 x 256 and open up your Xfile in Lithunwrap again.
Now, click Materials, rename it Miranda.bmp, and right click, then properties. Under Diffuse Map, select BMP, then Properties>Change>miranda.bmp. Now at the top, click Preview>Show Model. You may have to go back and forth between Lithunwrap and your image editor; I find it's easiest to keep them both open and just click reload under the same properties menu that you initially loaded the material to in the first place.

With any luck, that should get you on your way. I know it seems like a lot, but once you know your way around, you can probably kick out a pretty good looking model in under an hour. And good choice with the Miranda-- that's one of my all time favorite Trek ships.

Take care,

Drake

[Cleeve]

First off... guys, there's a million models on my site, www.STARYARDS.com. You can use 'em all, just remember to CREDIT the original model author if you release a mod with one of their models.

The right way to put it in credits if you convert it to Starfury format and release it to the public is to have a readme.txt file listing:

Model author: (3d model Author name)
Converted to Starfury format by: (Your name)

As far as conVersion, MAN! This game is EASY! It's really sad that it doesn't support illumination maps though. ALthough the starfury engine doesn't seem to have a problem with 512*512 textures, it looks like 256*256 isn't the limit. I converted my Eximius class design with the full 512*512 maps no problem:

www.staryards.com/Images/SF_eximius.jpg

[ November 03, 2003, 01:37: Message edited by: Cleeve ]