Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Melkor on December 04, 2008, 03:35:47 pm
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Could some helpful person give me a suggestion for modelling software? and (if you think it may be helpful) give some basic instructions on how to use this software efficiently,
I have found modelling to be extremely difficult in the past and as there seem to be many more understanding people than me for this topic, I hope that people will give only useful advice
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Sketchup, Blender, and 3ds max are all very good. Sketchup is good for beginers, but limits you more than blender or 3ds max. Blender has an extremely confusing GUI but is controlled using mainly keyboard shortcuts. 3ds Max is probably out of the question unless you want to pirate it, since it costs obscene amounts of money.
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Thanks for the info, but where would I obtain any of these programmes?
3ds Max is probably out of the question unless you want to pirate it, since it costs obscene amounts of money.
How much do you mean by "obscene"?
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as in $1000 at the cheapest non-student, extremely function deprived version. :p
cinema4D is one of the best apps to start with. easy to get to grips with, powerfull when you need it.
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owwwwww!
thats a little out of my price range,
where could i get "cinema4D" from?
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I'm an amature modeler myself and from my experiences it just takes some playing with it to learn it. I started on truespace... From my prospective, true space is a good place to start if nothing else than to learn how to play connect the dots in 3D where you can make your own dots :p
It takes a bit of getting used to, esp with the controls hiding in menus the way it does, but the program itself is fairly comprehensive. There's alot of newbie modeling guides available on line but in my experience, nothing beats jumping in and getting your hands dirty.
Personally what I would do is learn how to create primitives first and see how you can modify them. (by primitives, basic shapes, boxes, spheres, cylinders etc). You'll begin to see how you can take a simple 6 sided cube and turn it into a 50 bajillion faced polygon that vaguely resembles a ship or some such thing.
I haven't messed with blender so I couldn't tell ya much about it. TS, however, is a good program for the cost (its free btw lol) I will for warn ya tho that TS has a tendency to crash if it doesn't like a particular piece of geometry. Just make sure you save often and it'll save you alot of head ache :p
If you decide to use TS, you'll need to find the True View plugin for it... atleast if you're going to make FS models.
oh and here, this is a good guide to understanding with TS... its written for version 3.2 but 7.6 is essentially the same and does all of what the guide says... http://underworld.fortunecity.com/pacman/106/fs2mods/shipcreationguide/
That got me started. It may leave you asking a few questions but thats ok. Once you get started playing around with TS, it will make alot more sense and one day it'll all just click and there ya go =)
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where could i get "cinema4D" from?
Probably from here. (http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cinema+4D)
Can you figure out where to get Blender?
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where could i get "cinema4D" from?
Probably from here. (http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cinema+4D)
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???
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;7
(as much as I hate single-emoticon posts)
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omg lol... i've never seen that before =D I'm sorry, im not trying to be mean, but thats pretty damn funny lol
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Dang, that's awesome.
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where could i get "cinema4D" from?
Probably from here. (http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cinema+4D)
Can you figure out where to get Blender?
:lol:
Have to remember that one.
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???
Of course he is not. HLP is dead serious business. There is no humour. Never has been and never will be.
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where could i get "cinema4D" from?
Probably from here. (http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=cinema+4D)
Can you figure out where to get Blender?
:lol:
Have to remember that one.
ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY???
Of course he is not. HLP is dead serious business. There is no humour. Never has been and never will be.
???
He, for some reason, instead of helping me by giving a direct link to a relatively useful site, has decided to try and be smart!
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he does have a point tho, google is your friend for stuff you dont know about.
[edit]in any case, here's a link to the demo
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Editors/CINEMA-4D.shtml
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thanks for the help ;)
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Another one is Maya, but it's beyond ridiculously expensive. There is a 30 day demo or something like that, but your luck may be better to get a free program instead of a $5000 dollar program... :nod:
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or just sing the pirate song :p
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Blender3d is DA BESTSS.
http://www.blender.org/
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or da worrrrssstssss, if you're used to a button heavy, intuitive interface. truespace has a better interface than blender. hell, i started in truespace 3.2 and switched over to cinema 4d more or less seamlessly.
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:eek:
Truespaces' interface is terrible!
Truespace Dev:"I got an idea, why don't we hide ALL the useful buttons behind other buttons!"
Truespace Dev2:"Yeah! and then we can make the mouse useless so that users are forced to use our buttons just to move around!"
Dev1:"I got another idea! we should make it impossible to align the view to vertices or axis, that way they have to keep moving the view around (again using our buttons) to align things right!"
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... and dev 2 said "puff puff give, mother ******!" and they giggled like school girls and lived happily ever after
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ts 3.2 was useable and i preferred the "hidden" buttons. kept much of the screen free for the main view. reason i switched to C4D was mostly C4D's vastly superior render engine.
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Shouldn't rendering come second to things like how good of a model you can make when you're making a model for a game, and not a movie?
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Truespaces' interface is terrible!
I completely agree. After one look at it... :hopping:
That may just be me though. There's some I'm sure that are just fine with Truespace.
or just sing the pirate song :p
Even if you wanted I'm sure it wouldn't be that easy. Plus I'm sure most highly recommend against it. :nervous:
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you could also try wings3d
(google)
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Shouldn't rendering come second to things like how good of a model you can make when you're making a model for a game, and not a movie?
back then my models were crappy enough that it didnt matter :p when i switched out to c4d, things started to go quite rapidly. but now i'm stuck on unwrapping -.-
or to be more precise, i have no idea how to do proper unwraps which can nicely ignore seams.
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Truespace Interface is BRILLIANT (aside from 7.1 What were tehy thinking with that thing? Good thing you can change the interface layouts)
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Truespace Interface is BRILLIANT (aside from 7.1 What were tehy thinking with that thing? Good thing you can change the interface layouts)
Can you? And is ther version previous to 7.1 free?
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The latest free one before that was 3.2. It was pretty old.
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Is there a plug-in or something for Truespace that will allow it to open a .cob file, or does 7.1 not do that?
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...
I'd imagine-I'd hope they'd have the sense to include support for their own object format with all versions. (COB = Caligari OBject)
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...I'd imagine-I'd hope they'd have the sense to include support for their own object format with all versions. (COB = Caligari OBject)
You would think. :rolleyes: That (and the Truespace interface) is why I don't like it. In a nutshell, it doesn't support .cob (and it doesn't save as a .cob or a .scn either.)
Do you think it would be worth downloading the OLD version to convert a model to a .cob or a .scn format?
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What? It can too. It's hidden under a different menu button though than the usual save/open dialog. I forget where but there's a button in the upper right by default...
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7.6 can
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7.6 can
Where?
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http://www.caligari.com/Products/trueSpace/tS75/Brochure/Intro.asp
just click download on that page, register and download ts 7.6 (i know it says 7.5 in the link but its 7.6, i promise)
*edit
I almost forgot, when you save the .cob, it'll give you a choice for what version to save it as... make sure its either version 3 or 5... cant exactly remember, all others wont import into PCS properly (and make sure you select all objects and save object as, not scene)
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I have 7.6 (so it says.) I save the .cob file using 3dexploration and try to open it with Truespace, but it doesn't give me that open option. And it doesn't save as a .cob or a .scn (for me anyhow.)
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thats very odd... are you on the work space screen when you try to open/save? or on the show case or w/e its called screen
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Ya, I'm on the workspace screen when I try to open/save. Is there a problem with that screen?
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nope, thats where you should be... bleh i wish i still had TS on my pc so i can help you better... can you open up the "File" menu and take a screen shot of it for me?
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Sure thing. Here: (Sorry about the picture quality. I don't know why it did that.)
[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]
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ok i see what the problem is. in the upper * left hand corner, click on Truespace 6, then below that click on model... try agian =D
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Thanks. :) Truespace will open it now. Is it normal when I save it as a Caligari .cob file for PCS2 to not show the object?
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you need to select the right object version. I can't remember which version off the top of my head but in the pull down menu is a list of several file formats including 4 or 5 .cob's. I think it was version 3 or 5, i'm just not sure. Also, you need a light source on the model, doesn't matter where just so long as you have 1. and the texture maps need to be in a folder where pcs can see them or you can manually point to the maps also
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1. I don't have texture maps (are they needed?)
2. When I tried the 3rd saving format (Truespace 6.0 object) and the 5th saving format (Truespace 4.3 object) and opened it in PCS2 it gave me an error saying "No groups defined" and crashed.
3. I don't know how to add lighting (it may be the whole problem I guess.)
4. Sorry for being a pain, but it sure helps. :)
EDIT: It works. I tried it with a newer version of PCS2 and it opened and saved as a .pof Thanks for all the help!!! :) I do have one more question though: How do you add multiple lights in truespace to the model (the model is very dark in modview.) :)
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no worries. Firstly it sounds like you need to get the True View plugin for TS. You gotta set up the object hierchy.
I'm pretty sure PCS wont display models with out textures, even if you've assigned the objects a "material" color. Otherwise they just show up black.
As far as adding a light, i forget how to do it but it's simple.
Read over this guide by IP Andrews. It'll tell you what you need to know about getting a model from TS into PCS. Its written for ts 3.x but the tools are the same (just might have a different location/icon).
http://underworld.fortunecity.com/pacman/106/fs2mods/shipcreationguide/
I think the guide also has a link to the trueview plugin. it does work with 7.6
If this is your first time really doing this, what I would do to learn what you're doing, make a simple object, like a box, create a 2nd box and stick em close to each other and make one a child to the other. Create a generic texture with your favorite texturing program (or even use one that you already have from another model), assign that texture in TS, save as cob and open it with pcs.
The guide will tell you all that you need to know to make it happen. There may be some interface quirks with TS that will cause you to have some questions but thats not a problem =) It just takes time to learn it
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Thanks so much! :D I'll point out any questions I have. :)
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Trueview 1.2 (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/files/trueview12.7z)
Trueview 1.5 (http://swc.fs2downloads.com/files/tview15.zip)
1.2 came with TS3.2 I believe, and 1.5 was a later upgraded version.