[bobbery]

Hi All,

I am new to the forum and to FS2 modding in general, however I have been a modeler in the industry for many years-- just decided to branch out and muck around with FSOpen on the side. It is very impressive, what you guys have done with the freespace 2 engine so far by the way.

Anyway, hopefully this is the right place to ask for import/export help..

I have been trying for the better part of the day to get the hang of bringing models into the engine, and after many hours of digging through the forums, I am stumped.

Right now, this is the situation :
I have a simple cube, with a simple DDS texture applied to it, created in Max 7 and exported using the Max 6 exporter plugin found from these forums. After export, I imported the cube.pof into PCS2 and everything looked fine there. (the cube is just a detail-0 model with nothing else attached).
Then, I altered a ships.tbl file to replace an existing pof with the pof I created, hoping to avoid having to trek through the table more thoroughly (it was the default ship GTF Ulysses fighter01.pof). Unfortunately when trying to run Fred2 Open, the model is not visible. Even after toggling Show Model and Show Outline, I am unable to see anything.

I am probably doing something horribly wrong here but I cant seem to see what it is. Anyone able to help?

Thank you!

[Jeff Vader]

Have you remembered to place the model and the textures into the appropriate folders?

[bobbery]

i believe so.

cube.pof is in the data/models directory
Basic.dds is in the data/maps directory

[Titan]

Is it in /freespace/data/(maps/models) directory?

You need to make a mod folder and get it setup for this to work i think 

Then again, i'm 12, so... 

[Jeff Vader]

Not necessarily. It might be good to fiddle around with mod folders, but if none are at use, the game engine should read \freespace\data\ as well.

[blowfish]

In PCS, go to "Textures" and make sure that 'basic' is there and when you click it it highlights the whole cube.  If this doesn't work, it means that the texture wasn't applied properly or it got lost somewhere along the process.

[bobbery]

Thanks for the replies.

The model and texture is indeed viewable in pcs2, so I think the problem is in me jury rigging the table.. I might try to see if i can make a clean table entry today instead of hijacking an existing one...

Edit: trying to troubleshoot it deeper, I just took the standard fighter01.pof model and applied my basic.dds texturemap to it. That made the model disappear too. So I swapped it out for basic.pcx which is the same texture but saved as a 256 pcx and it worked. I am thinking I am doing something wrong with the dds...

[Wanderer]

What size is that DDS? Also what DDS format is that file of yours? Assuming it is compressed then it needs to have dimensions in 'powers of two'. For example 256 x 256 is ok but 255 x 255 is not.

[bobbery]

Wanderer, thank you so much! I knew I was doing something utterly stupid. For some (stupid) reason I had it at 640x640. Brain fart. Resized it to 512x512 and it works fine.

Thanks again!

[Getter Robo G]

Bobbery, don't forget to come back and show us what you tinker with later... As you're someone "in the industry", I am sure we would be very interested in seeing what you play around with.

Or better yet, since you're experienced, feel like possibly helping out some projects that need a modeler's touch?
 

[bobbery]

Since I managed to get the cube working and kinda have figured out the export process, Im actually back to making the models I plan to bring into the engine. Right now, its on the tedious in-between state of block model and detail mesh, so I dont expect to see much in the way of an in-game model anytime soon. Still, here is a snapshot of what I plan to bring in at some point.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Not very FreeSpacey, but a nice model anyway

[Titan]

Go talk to robotech.  That looks a little like the walker-mode thingies.

[Getter Robo G]

Looks like a self universe, but kinda reminds me of a Zeon type design...

 

[Retsof]

Where'd you get the name "Baby Zee"  (I know someone with the screen name "Baby Z" in another forum.)

[Jake2447]

Nice looking shots.  Its an original design, which I like.  Are you planning on supplementing this model with other models from the universe this comes from?  If you were devoted and learned FRED, this could be a good mod.