Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: pyro-manic on February 12, 2005, 01:26:32 pm

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: pyro-manic on February 12, 2005, 01:26:32 pm

OK, I'm looking to texture my Iron Duke ship, but Lithunwrap can't read .gmax files. Looking at tutorials I got the idea that a program called 3D Exploration could convert it to a useful format, but I can't find a download of it - only something called Deep Exploration, which costs a lot of money.

I'm stuck. Does anyone have this program, or a suggestion for an alternative? My searching has come to nothing....

Many thanks,

pyro :)

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: Gank on February 12, 2005, 01:38:38 pm

Export it as md3 with the tempest game pack and convert it using 3dexploration. Nothing will read gmax files. Deep exploration will work if you download it of the site but only for 30 days, should be able to find an older copy of 3dex if you look harder though, anything up until version 1.6 doesnt have a time limit on it.

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: karajorma on February 12, 2005, 01:40:09 pm

3D Exploration (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/Downloads/3D%20Exploration.rar) (not very) time limited demo.

I realised when you mentioned it that someone in the community should definately have a copy up for download :)

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: KARMA on February 12, 2005, 06:18:15 pm

in aldo's site theres a full functional 3dex, you'll just have to reload it after 5 files opened. 3dex can't open directly gmax files

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: aldo_14 on February 13, 2005, 06:14:11 am

http://www.3dactionplanet.com/hlp/hosted/casofwar/reci_website/mods_tools.html

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: pyro-manic on February 13, 2005, 07:23:47 am

Eeeeexcellent....

Cheers peeps! :)

EDIT: OK, slight problem. I may just be being stupid, but I can't get Tempest to export. I open the export dialogue, tell it where to save to, filename, format etc, and then a window pops up with a load of options, none of which I have any idea about. Clicking "Export Now" then gives me a "No frames specified" error. I've no idea what that means, and there's no documentation with the tempest pack. How do I make it work?


PS: Sorry about this. It appears very n00bish, I know - something I try to avoid, but there's no useful info I can find about this...

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: redsniper on February 13, 2005, 12:04:15 pm

just export the first frame

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: pyro-manic on February 13, 2005, 12:27:27 pm

OK, that's... odd. I did that (just type 1 into the box, yeah?), and it spat out this horrible mangled mess:

(http://www.hostedimage.com/is.php?i=45169&img=duke-mess.jpg)

:wtf: is going on there?

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: Hippo on February 13, 2005, 01:01:58 pm

you have to invert the faces

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: StratComm on February 13, 2005, 01:08:11 pm

Wow, that is horrid.  Smoothing is off completely too, so you may have to somehow reset face smoothing in a different modeling program.

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: Taristin on February 13, 2005, 01:06:36 pm

Err. Sometimes, there are some alterations made to the meshes in their proprietary formats that 3dex doesn't understand. I've had some weird things happen on a ship that Ryx made, because of that.

You should make sure the file is correct after conversion, and not rely so heavily on 3dex's viewport, all the time. :)

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: pyro-manic on February 13, 2005, 01:21:22 pm

Oh god. I think that :hopping: is an accurate description of my mood right now. I'm beyond confused at this point, and I don't know what the hell I'm doing, or what's gone wrong. I've tried re-converting it a few times, and the same thing has happened. The resultant MD3 file won't open again in Tempest (which created it in the first place), so I  don't know if it's just 3DEx playing up or the conversion going wrong. All I wanted to do was to have a go at basic texturing... :doubt:

Would someone be willing to have a look at the mesh for me, and see what's up with it? Cheeky, I know, but I'm stumbling around in the dark with all this stuff and I'm at a loss. I may see if I can find a copy of 3DS Max so I don't have to deal with all this conversion stuff...

EDIT: here's the file: www.freewebs.com/pyro-manic/ironduke.rar

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: Gank on February 14, 2005, 01:51:50 pm

Reet, open up the file in tempest, see the grey box? That I think is some sort of size limit on the models/maps you can export. Anyways scale it down to about one third the length of the box, export frame 0 and you should have a unborked model to convert.

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: pyro-manic on February 14, 2005, 04:11:58 pm

Gank, you are a f**king star. Get yourself a very large beer. :yes: Sorted it out beautifully! Many, many thanks. :)

(http://www.hostedimage.com/is.php?i=45268&img=converted.jpg)

Now to texture the beastie...

Title: 3d Exploration?
Post by: Gank on February 14, 2005, 04:41:13 pm

no prob