Any 3d Milkshape users here? (ST Models Available) - Page 2

President_Elect_Shang · #11 January 1st, 2007, 10:32 PM

Despite these challenges I am very happy to see the old Atrocities fire stoking back up. I was a little worried that the SE Series was about to lose one of its greatest. I have faith you will get the models working and produce them for us all to admire and use.

Atrocities · #12 January 1st, 2007, 10:37 PM

Well I guess we could go pull the Armada models, and perhaps even those from BOTF for that matter.

I wonder if there is a way to beef up the 3d system in SE V via a patch or something?

shinigami · #13 January 1st, 2007, 10:48 PM

Not that an end-user could do. Now if MM were to do a rewrite...

What we're running into is a problem that plagues small software developers, either they have to pay through the nose to license an engine from someone else, or they have to reinvent the wheel in order to put some eye-candy on the screen.

se5a · #14 January 2nd, 2007, 12:27 AM

ok got it. meta is just a bit fussy about where it looks for the texture files.

in meta.

Open LWO6_Model.lwo (the other one does not have the textures mapped)
it should open the model and you should also get a little "Material Panel" (click "MatPane" button if it's not there)
the material panel will have 4 materials in it, double click the first one, you will get a bit "Material Property" window.
at the bottem of the window there's a text box labeled "Texture" with "f_lakota_1.bmp" in it.
this is where metasoquia is a bit dumb, it's not looking in the folder where the mesh model is to find the texture. so click the "Ref" button and direct it to the correct file in the SFC_Excelsior_B directory.
do this for all the materials and you should be good.

these models are rather high polly, you could reduce some of them by taking out some of the detail underneeth the ship, since you don't see that much in seV. also some of the rounded dome bits could probibly be reduced too, they are probibly a bit higher than whan you need in seV.
then again, some peoples computers may be able to handle the high pollys anyway

se5a · #15 January 2nd, 2007, 12:29 AM

Quote:

shinigami said:
Not that an end-user could do. Now if MM were to do a rewrite...

What we're running into is a problem that plagues small software developers, either they have to pay through the nose to license an engine from someone else, or they have to reinvent the wheel in order to put some eye-candy on the screen.

nah, he should have used Oger, it's open source, free, can be used in a retail game, and one of the better graphics engines out there.

shinigami · #16 January 2nd, 2007, 01:17 AM

Very, very good point! Ogre could have given us some serious eye-candy.

More developers need to take a good hard look at Ogre and not be scared-off by the term "open source." Most folks tend to think all open-source stuff is GPL'd and that they would have to release all their source code but that is not the case with Ogre, it is released as LGPL.

Put simply, if you modify the engine you have to share those modifications, the rest of your code is... your code! You don't have to show it to anyone.

Kana · #17 January 2nd, 2007, 02:30 AM

Quote:

Atrocities said:
Well I guess we could go pull the Armada models, and perhaps even those from BOTF for that matter.

Well there are plenty of models for Armada 1 and 2...and I think that someone posted the BOTF models somewhere for SFC, I think I saw them on battleclinic the other day.

Best sites for Armada models and mods...

http://armada2.filefront.com/
http://www.armadafleetcommand.com/afc/index.php

Atrocities · #18 January 2nd, 2007, 03:38 AM

Thanks Se5a for the meta info.

Kana I tried to open the SOD files that I downloaded from the filefront site and Armada HQ site, with Milkshape using the SOD plugin, and it errored out saying that it could only open stock SOD files. Do you know of a way around this?

Atrocities · #19 January 2nd, 2007, 04:02 AM

I really hate to say this about SE V, but that God Damned X viewer is a real pain in the ***! It is so damn finicky about what X files it will or won't open.

ANything with any amount of texturing to it and you get that alarming BEEP "error" message. SE V is proving to be far more frustrating than enjoyable at this point and that is in no small part to this crappy DirectX modeling system that Aaron elected to go with.

Phoenix-D · #20 January 2nd, 2007, 04:04 AM

The model viewer is a pain, yes. I find it easier just to load the blasted things into the game myself.