[Scooby_Doo]

I should have started this thread awhile ago instead of getting off topic. 


Ok heres the rendered truespace view (take note of the rounded barrel just behind the gun on the wing ends) :


and after running it through pof_facet heres what modelview shows


What am I doing wrong?

[Vasudan Admiral]

Tried increasing the autofacet angle on ONLY the material assigned to the gun pods?

[Scooby_Doo]

Ahh that might have been part of the problem.  Truespace smoothed the edges when it shouldn't have.

Although I've got another problem now. Each of the triangles now seems to have a slightly different smoothing angle. It's as if the vertex normals for each triangle are not matching up.

Overall autofacet was set to 34, the gun pod is set to 60.

This is starting to look a lot harder than I was hoping for.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Hmm, just a suspicion, but in TS go into edit mode and see what happens if you grab some of those problem verticies and move them away from the rest. They should drag all their connected faces with them - do they?

If they do drag the faces with them, it means it's just PCS not being good with the smoothing rather than disconnected faces.
So, in this case I'd recommend you try with a standard build of PCS. This time you'd set the rest of the ship to faceted, and the gun pod to auto-faceted (angle doesn't matter). This should result in a faceted ship and a smoothed gunpod because of TS being mixed up in smoothing types.

Failing all that, just subdivide the rings at either end of the gunpod and move the new verts around to make it smooth geometrically.

[Scooby_Doo]

Ok now this looks much better. The barrels now appear smoothed much nicer.  The only catch is that the facet hull will need quite a bit of touching up. Theres many polygons that have normals just a little bit different than their neighbors. 

As for the max pof converter, well i've gotten it to finally produce a pof without crashing (there was a particle view in the file) I think was causing it to crash.  Alone with having to assign the main body detail-0 name, link all the subobjects to it, then group everything into a group.

[Scooby_Doo]

Is there ANYWAY to select multiple polys to paint in truespace? Painting one at a time takes way to long to do anything meaningful.

I give up......

is autofacetted totally nonuseable with PCS? I tried autofactting even with small angle numbers and it looks completely smoothed.

[bizzybody]

I just did this test.

Pop up a sphere.

Set the material you want to paint on many faces.

Hit the Point Edit: Faces button then ctrl+click to select all the faces you want to paint at once.

In the Material editor, click the Paint Face button and all selected faces get painted. If Paint Face isn't the current button in the group, click and drag to it to make it the current button.

Drat. Looks like those buttons on the Material Editor are the only ones you can't put on a custom toolbar, at least in 6.5. (I downgraded from 6.6 so Conversion Pack 2.0 would work. Conversion Pack 2.1 works for 6.5 or 6.6.)

[Vasudan Admiral]

If you're experimenting with various autofacet values, the replace material button makes it a bit easier if you're not using it already. Basically TS sees a texture with an autofacet angle of 32 as being a separate texture from an identical one with an angle of 33.

So, as long as you don't happen to test the angle you've used everywhere else on the ship, you'll only have to paint those faces once. TS should continue to see that group as a separate material from the rest of the ship.

[Scooby_Doo]

TS 7 allows you to select a region (and add/remove as necessary) and apply a texture/smoothing to that section. This is what I was looking for.

But I've come across another problem.  This one isn't a PCS problem, rather it looks like cob format has changed somewhat or something weird is happening.  COB files lose their texture information when I import them into TS3.2 and PCS (pcs reports 0 textures after converting).  In TS 7 it complains about missing textures, with filenames that look like it's reading binary data as char data.

[Bobboau]

PCS can't open TS7 cobs?

BTW are you sure you are useing the most recent version of PCS, auto-facet suport was only included in the last version.

[Scooby_Doo]

I don't know, I might be doing something wrong. 

PCS reports this:
Input was: 0 Materials, 5 Groups, 5 Lights, and 25 PolyGroups.
Started with 6153 and ended with 2241 points, in 4298 and 4034 faces respectivily......

It looks like the mesh data is there, just not the texture data.

[Scooby_Doo]

I'm not sure what the problem is... either I'm doing something wrong or TS 7 cob format isn't good. 

• I made a simple box
• figured out how to glue a light to it (couldn't find trueview  )
• Dragged a new texture onto the material thingie
• applied the texture to the cube
• cube uvmapped it
• saved to cob

PCS still reports 0 materials, Ts 3.2 doesn't see any textures on it.
however TS 7 imports it without any problems, unlike my models