Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Stormkeeper on June 30, 2007, 10:29:56 am
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Well, the title says it. The model is a tS3 model, and when i convert it to pof in modelview it becomes messed up. The guns and stuff are all inside the model. I'm using modelview cuz pcs crashes on me everytime i use it. I'll get some SSs up when my internet connection stabilizes; right now it freaks up when i ul/dl stuff.
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1) modelview should not be used to convert models
2) if pcs crashes that means something is wrong with your model
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yeah, PCS is the judge and jury and often or not the executioner. it would be cool if it showed a little animated guillotine every time it hates a model.
do you get an error message of any kind when it crashes?
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it would be cool if it showed a little animated guillotine every time it hates a model.
You have no idea how much that would piss me off.
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it would piss me off too, but atleast you would have something fun to watch as every thing decides to CTD. or add a bunch of different animation of executions that circulate randomly.
"my model screwed up, how is it going to die this time?" grab some popcorn... and plot on how you want to kill your computer. actually you might be on to something. this is a bad idea. yeah..i digress. we dont need PCS egging us one when we are already having destructive violent urges at that point in time.
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Nope no error message. Just major laggage, and then it asks me to debug the program. I'll try again using my little cargo box.
Aite, screenies. Feel free to point out whats wrong. I'm not too used to trueSpace ... yet.
(http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a354/sohmingjian/SS01Proper.jpg)
(http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a354/sohmingjian/SS01.jpg)
... Now i'm wondering if that side panel of the ship is causing this error.
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:headz:
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:headz:
.... Therefore I conclude that the head of the model is the problem.
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Well, looks like it's putting the centre of every sub-object at 0.0
Can you post a picture of the Hierarchy setup for the model?
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Ooops, edited by mistake, sorry :nervous:
Basically you posted this...
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a354/sohmingjian/untitled.jpg
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There's part of the problem...
If this is designed as a fighter, you've broken the model up into subsystems which isn't strictly needed, and may well confuse the converter, you also need to put lights in as a terminator for each subsystem.
I'd guess that the Weaponbanks submodel being empty and having child models is what is confusing the conversion process, try throwing all your models into a single group with a light at the end and see how that converts.
Be aware though that, iirc, too many intersecting sub-models makes PCS an unhappy bunny as far as collision detection is concerned ;)
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that model is NOT in compliance with COB->POF conversion specs for any converter
(Most Serious) Violated Rule: there must be no group without geometry
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No group without geometry?
I think i'll stick to squarey models for now. Seems the safest.
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He's talking about object groups that consist of only other object groups. The red ones here:
(http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/GeometrylessHierarchy.jpg)
Everything pointed to by the red arrows will crash PCS2. Everything pointed to by green arrows will create separate objects in FS2, which in this case is not what you want at all. Everything I see there should all be contained in one piece of geometry.
So for that model, your whole hierarchy should look like this:
(http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/SimpleHeirarchy.jpg)
The highlighted "detail0" will be interpreted as an object by PCS2 and will become your main LOD hull in game.
You use separate objects/object groups for things that you want FS to recognise as separate parts - like turrets, radar dishses, LODs or debris chunks. That kind of thing. You don't use them to better organise the parts of your model while in TS. ;)
Here's an example of a more complex hierarchy setup:
(http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/Misc/HealthyHierarchy.jpg)
Please for your own sanity note that the names of the stuff that makes up each object group, (ie, TurretArm_Geometry and LightGluedToTurretArm_Geometry) are NOT important! ;)
I've just written them out like that to show what each part is. As far as PCS and FS are concerned, ONLY the names of the object group they are a part of (ie, Turret01-Arm) are important.
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... Therefore, if i unglue MainBody, MainGuns, LowerGun, LeftGun, RightGun and Secondary banks, it should work?
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yup, just find your "split hierarchy" button (its under the "glue as sibling" or "glue as child" tab, it will be either or depending on whatever was selected last) to separate all your cubes to individuals, and you can go about this one of a few ways:
1) take all your cubes and glue them together as siblings, so your trueview archy will look like this
+model's hull <rename this though
cube
cube
cube
local light
infact all you have to do in trueview is drag one cube and drop it on another to to create a new group, and then drag and drop all other cubes and finally a light into that group. PCS will recognize this single group of multiple objects as you fighter.
while this is not really good modeling practice for fighters, it does sometimes come in handy. it is also good for hunting down any bad geometry. if PCS hates the model you can remove 1 piece at a time to see which piece it hates.
2) object union, found under your boolean operations tab along with object subtract and so on. this more or less welds separate objects into one solid object, so cubes 1-12 lets say becomes cube1. if you do this the objects cannot be separated from each other so its wise to save before you do this and save it as a different model afterwards like "fighter" and then "fighter1", that way you can go back and fix things if they get screwy on you and it gives you a more raw version of the model so you can go back and remove or change separate parts later. a note on unions, TS can be finicky about this and unions of complex geometry have been know to cause hassles with PCS and ingame. I've had a few issues with this, but over all nothing catastrophic that made me have to toss a model, then again thats why i save the model pre-union, so if a union does go wrong, you can go back and correct it. you just have to play trial and error with this one.
3) Extrusions, slicing, sweeps and bevels. these are what you use to create object extensions you would otherwise union to the model later. this can be time consuming and irritating yes, but the advantages are this, rather than mating two pieces together, you are sculpting and bending one solid piece, so virtually none of the issues of boolean ops arise this way, and often or not you can achieve much better results using this method.
drop in a cube or whatever and torture it with this method and see what you can come up with. but as far your model is concerned, which i gather you dont really want to delete any geometry, try options 1 and 2.
yup, to much coffee in the morning makes me hammer out stuff... :nervous:
anybody correct me if i am wrong or left something out.
hell, im not even sure if this post was necessary. if it helps any, COOL!
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One bit of advice I'd give though, is avoid using the Boolean operations, they create floating points and polygons that can really make PCS confused, try to avoid using them unless you are doing it on simple objects, preferably intersecting only a single polygon, boolean-unioning two sphere's together, for example, can make a real mess where they join, it's probably better to weld the points individually, even though it takes much longer :)
Not a mistake, but a useful thing to remember ;)
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Oh, that fighter was created solely with extrusions, and added a few cylinders for the barrels, plus another rectangle for the secondary banks.
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some names are special
"detailN" will create a detail level (if detail1 is a child of detail0 it'll be reparented to no parent)
"debrisN" will create a chunk of debris
"turretN" will create a turret (there is extensions of this for multipart turrets - turretN-base and turretN-barrels)
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So basically I put it in a group, name it 'detail0', and it will be the main lod that FS2 will show?
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yup and it's children will be it's children in FS2 - (except any child that is "DetailN" gets reparented to no-parent)
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What i don't get is how do i do multiple lods in fs2.
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Make a subobject named Detail1 and attach it to the main object. Then add a light to the same group as Detail1 as a terminator for the group. PCS will read 'Detail1' as Lod1 when converting the model, Detail2 as Lod 2 etc. Remember to make Detail2 etc a sub-object of the main model not of Detail1 ;)
I'm not certain, but from what Kazan is saying, I think you can just name the Detailx model as 'detailx' (where x = Lod number) and that's enough for PCS 2.