#16
Hehe, I guess that depends on your modelling skill. I only need a helping hand with a single model, since I'm building the others (and other elements) and it would save some time.
The Expanse. Watch it!
If you're using blender to model these in, you need look no further for a UV mapper. Blender's UV mapper is excellent, and while there are a couple of features I'd like from lithunwrap that blender's doesn't have, overall it's considerably more powerful.Also, my attempts at some hard-core UV mapping have failed. I tried using Truespace for UV mapping, but in the forums I saw people saying things things like "for the love of God don't use Truespace!" I now see why...it is a pain. I've downloaded LithUnwrap, but I still haven't got it 100% figured out.
The various file format exporters and importers were all written by different Blender users, and as such they have different levels of stability, capability and completion. The truespace COB exporter is unfortunately one of the less capable ones.
It will be able to export all your objects and have TS recognise them as separate objects, it will keep the UV data of your textures and sometimes keep the objects positions relative to each other correctly. It won't however export the heirarchy, textures (it gives everything a default texture) and usually not object centres.
However, there is a way to get your textured Blender models into TS ready for heirarchy setup and conversion. It will require that you set up your parts so they look something like this in Blenders outliner view:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/V ... erView.jpg
All that's significant about this stage is that you have all the objects using their correct textures:
Each object (ie, Detail0, CockpitGlass, Debris01 etc)
is linked to only one mesh (ie, bomber09a_hull, HP-Cockpit.001, bomber09a_hull.006 etc),
which in turn is linked to a material (ie, ZeusHull, Cockpit, Zeus Debris etc),
which is linked to one texture (ie, ZeusDebrisTexture, ZeusHullTexture, CockpitTexture.002 etc),
which is linked to one image file (ie, ZeusHTL.bmp, ZeusHTL-Debris.bmp, TERCOC01.bmp etc)
Notice that there's no object to object heirarchy there. All the objects are separate. I did a lot of exporting experimentation and found that none of the formats will preserve object to object heirarchy, so there's no point in assembling it in Blender. TS is actually better for that bit anyway.
So, once I'm at that stage, I export it as a DirectX .X file (just press the export all button in the dialogue box). From there, open it up in 3d exploration (D/L it here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/ ... r_v181.rar) and re-save it as a COB.
Because of Truespace' crappy importing, that's the only way you can get it to keep the objects separate. You'll still lose the object names and centres, but it's not too hard to figure them out again. They will retain their textures, positions relative to each other, and you'd probably have to have redone their centres anyway whether it preserved them or not.
Opening it up in TS, you'll see something like this in the scene editor: http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/V ... rarchy.jpg
From there just figure out what is what, set it up in TS as you would any other ships heirarchy, save to COB or SCN and convert using PCS. Have a look at Karajorma's turreting tutorial for more help there.
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