[Col. Fishguts]

So I got this up and running and it's all very nice. But I'm running into the same problem with one model that I had with the max exporter: Submodels that are outside the bounding box of detail0 are ghosting (shoot-though, fly-through).
Is that a problem with PCS2 or engine-related? I suspect PCS2, because we have some old TBP models that were created with PCS1.X and are working fine, but also have submodels outside the detail0 bounding box, so it was possible at one point.

I know the problem can be circumvented by some cleverly placed polys attached to detail0, but that's kinda the non-elegant solution 

[chief1983]

VA was discussing that issue a long time ago.  This is I think an engine problem that needs to be solved much more gracefully than it can be now.  Even if PCS2 could try and guess all possible subobject locations including rotations and expand the bounding box to include those, things like subobject translation (which I believe are only determinable when they happen) still make that fail I believe.

[Col. Fishguts]

So any idea what PCS1.X did different with the bounding boxes so that it didn't suffer from this problem?

[chief1983]

Maybe it did something that's technically 'wrong' but seemed to work ok? Or maybe PCS2 isn't doing something that it would be fine if it did, I don't know.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Yeah I don't get this thing. I open a .dae file in PCS2 that was exported out of Maya and all of my weapon points are in the wrong place and facing the wrong direction and so on and so forth. Oh and it's not reading the textures for some reason. Even though a previous build DOES read the textures (I downloaded what I take to be the newest one from the Wiki).

In either case the model enters at an odd angle, and half of the components seem shifted. So the actual fighter model for example seems shifted forward which results in the shield and all weapon/dock/subsystem points being in the wrong place (further back than they should be and/or at a wrong elevation relative to the model).

What the heck.

EDIT - oh I downloaded a different file off the Wiki (Jan 4 2009 build??) and it loads the textures but the ship is still out of sync with all of the relevant information. Including the shield and all points. Meanwhile in Maya, the shield mesh and the fighter mesh for example  both have translates of 0,0,0. So why when imported are they different????

[FUBAR-BDHR]

So I got this up and running and it's all very nice. But I'm running into the same problem with one model that I had with the max exporter: Submodels that are outside the bounding box of detail0 are ghosting (shoot-though, fly-through).
Is that a problem with PCS2 or engine-related? I suspect PCS2, because we have some old TBP models that were created with PCS1.X and are working fine, but also have submodels outside the detail0 bounding box, so it was possible at one point.

I know the problem can be circumvented by some cleverly placed polys attached to detail0, but that's kinda the non-elegant solution 

Try setting all subobject centers to 0,0,0 in your modeling program.  Convert the model then move them back in PCS2.  Usually solves that issue.

[Akalabeth Angel]

Hmmn, so somewhat inspired by fubar's message I reset transformations on my model and that seemed to get everything more/less where it's supposed to be. Or more accurately the guns are in the right place. Then however, I discover my fighter is upside down and backwards for some odd reason.  So I rotate it around. But NOW, my docking points and my thrusters are in the wrong places, while everything else remains the same. I parented everything to a locator in maya when I rotated it to get it rightside up so I don't know why these would be in teh wrong place why everything else is in the right place. I am however reminded of why I lost interest in modding.

Maybe I'll just have to shift/re-do this stuff in PCS2 since for whatever reason it's clearly not translating properly.

[Spicious]

There are options to rotate/flip everything in PCS 2 for Collada importing.

[Akalabeth Angel]

There are options to rotate/flip everything in PCS 2 for Collada importing.

Oh is there? Okay maybe I'll have to look into that next time. I just fixed the stuff more/less manually this time. Should be good enough.
Thanks

[pecenipicek]

A question for anyone still working with this, how does the importer behave when there are things as lights in the null hierarchies?

As i have a rather retarded situation with Cinema4D's collada exporter...

[Spicious]

I can still work on this but I have no idea how it would behave.

[pecenipicek]

well, perhaps just make it completely drop any data from lights found and then to parse the helper tree structure?

[Spicious]

What do lights turn into? Anything that doesn't have a special name and doesn't have any associated geometry should get ignored.

What exactly is the importer doing that isn't what you'd like?

[pecenipicek]

sometimes the transforms that were on the lights get applied to the nulls which shouldnt have said transforms. resetting transforms multiple times on the whole tree structure didnt help a lot unfortunately, and sometimes it completely scrapped a perfectly good pof otherwise.

note, i do not edit pofs in PCS2 much, i mostly edit them in C4D then re-export.

[Spicious]

Are these lights parents of the nulls? Small examples always help.

[Scooby_Doo]

UGH I wrote up a long response for the opencollada issue and the forum spit it back at me  

In short:
Look in <library_geometries><geometry><mesh><triangles> material attribute.  It points to a modified version of <library_materials><material>name attribute instead of id attribute.  The solution we've found so far is remove the appended _1 and append "-material".

The attachment contains a simple detail0 box.  It has two textures assigned to it, "Details 1" (confed_details_1.psd) and "Details 2" (confed_details_2.psd).


Here's some of the source for my little hack fix:

Code: [Select]

private void LoadGeometry(XmlNode node)
        {
            Debug.Assert(node != null, "param <node> is null");

            foreach (XmlNode geometry in node.ChildNodes)
            {
                // Make sure we're dealing with a geometry entry
                if (geometry.Name == "geometry")
                {
                    // Ignore shields, they don't need textures
                    if (IsShieldGeometry(geometry))
                        continue;

                    // Go through all of the geometry entry's children
                    foreach (XmlNode mesh in geometry)
                    {
                        // Make sure we're dealing with a <mesh>  There shouldn't be anything but <mesh> but just in case.
                        if (mesh.Name == "mesh")
                        {
                            // Go through each of it's children.  We're looking for just <triangles> entries.
                            foreach (XmlNode triangles in mesh)
                            {
                                if (triangles.Name == "triangles")
                                {
                                    for (int loop = 0; loop < triangles.Attributes.Count; loop++)
                                    {
                                        XmlAttribute material = triangles.Attributes[loop];

                                        // We're only interested in the material attribute
                                        if (material.Name == "material")
                                        {
                                            int foundAt = FindMaterial(material.Value);

                                            if (foundAt == -1)
                                            {
                                                Debug.Assert(false, "<Geometry<<Triangles material=> not found in <library_Geometries>");
                                            }

                                            // At this point simply append "-material" to the name.
                                            // We've already gotten rid of any excess "_1" or such from the string
                                            material.Value = materialNames[foundAt] + "-material";

                                        }
                                    }
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }

                }
            }
        }


        private int FindMaterial(String value)
        {
            Debug.Assert(value != null, "param <value> is null");

            bool done = false;

            while (!done)
            {
                // Attempt to find the material's value in a list containing all the materials <library_materials>
                int loc = materialNames.IndexOf(value);

                if (value.Length != 0)
                {
                    // Couldn't find it.  Probably as an extension appended to it.  Simply remove one char at a time till we find it or run of out chars
                    if (loc == -1)
                    {
                        value = value.Substring(0, value.Length - 1);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        return loc;
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    return -1;
                }
            }

            return -1;
        }


[attachment deleted by admin]

[Kazan]

I still need a changeset to get this integrated into the trunk (not 2_0-fixes) branch.  once that is integrated i'm goin to try to stabilize trunk and switch to SVN and then open up the repository to more contributors

i'm also going to be doing some significant code refactoring of the main program to clean up poor coding techniques i used in the past

[Goober5000]

[Spicious]

Try the attached.

Is there a problem with using a more modern VCS?

[attachment deleted by admin]

[chief1983]

Last I heard we plan to get it moved to SVN at some point.  And also to open up access to more SCP members.