[CainFortea]

Okay, i'm going to take you through a runthrough of what i'm doing to get models into Freespace.  A basic model, I just followed Sanwich's tutorial.

I model the ship in Rhinocerose, then I export it to TrueSpace 3.2.  I do all the normal flipping, texturing, and grouping there.  Then I export it to .cob, and change it to .pos with the PCS utility.  With that process I can get a poorly textured flak turret into FRED.  I don't know if i can get it into FSO, because I lost the link to the tutorial on how to edit sihp.tbl.  But thats neither here nor there.

The issues.

TrueSpace textures worth crap.  So I tried to use LithUnwrap to edit the UVmaps, so I could texture things correctly on my model.  And after a few hours of work (Most my turrets were at odd angles, so they wouldn't UVMap correctly, I had to use Planar then move all the faces and resize them to stack over eachother, sense they all use the same texture) I found that using LithUnwrap was fruitless.  Because now the .pos file I had been using somehow lost all the texture locations.  And it strait out crashed ModelView.  The question boils down to this.  Is there a way to export UVMaps from TrueSpace 3.2?  Or does anyone know what i'm doing wrong with LithUnwrap.  Any tutorials I find on these subjects assume you know where the texture files go and what not.  

Is there a tutorial, or is someone willing to explain to me, how to make glow maps, spec maps, and to add thrusters to a model for Freespace?  

If you think you know the answer to my queries, but you need more info, you can either post here or Email me @ [email protected]    Please keep your demeaning emails to a maximum of 1024 characters.  

[Col. Fishguts]

TrueSpace preserves UV coords fine when saving the model as a .cob.
For a complete tutorial, and especially to learn Lith,  check out this: http://underworld.fortunecity.com/pacman/106/fs2mods/shipcreationguide/

[karajorma]

Check my FAQ for links to IP Andrews Ship Creation Guide (Fishguts got there before me with that one )  or Bobboau's PCS guide. They should help a little with the thruster question (The first is especially good for Lith)

When using Lith you should remember to export the model as well as the maps. I've found a couple of times (probably something I did wrong) that the selected map has vanished from the ship once I got it back to Truespace (which sounds like your problem) but in those cases if I chose the BMP texture I created in Lith and paint it back on I end up where I wanted to be.

BTW it's .pof not .pos all though there are times you make think that your model really is a POS

[CainFortea]

Originally posted by Col. Fishguts
TrueSpace preserves UV coords fine when saving the model as a .cob.
For a complete tutorial, and especially to learn Lith,  check out this: http://underworld.fortunecity.com/pacman/106/fs2mods/shipcreationguide/

When I export the model from TS to Lith, I open the file up in Lith to do the real texturing and UVMap manipulation.  If I could somehow export the TS UVMaps, so I wouldn't even have to touch Lith, I'd be fine.  But as soon as I try to do something with Lith, it somehow boggles up the file, and its now useless.

Karajarma said
[B}Check my FAQ for links to IP Andrews Ship Creation Guide (Fishguts got there before me with that one  ) or Bobboau's PCS guide. They should help a little with the thruster question (The first is especially good for Lith)
[/B]

The thruster question in Bobboau's faq doesn't answer one question though...what is the thruster suposed to be?  Do I model some kind of cone where the thrusters should be, and glue a light to it?  Or is it just a plain ole light sitting at a certain spot?

When using Lith you should remember to export the model as well as the maps. I've found a couple of times (probably something I did wrong) that the selected map has vanished from the ship once I got it back to Truespace (which sounds like your problem) but in those cases if I chose the BMP texture I created in Lith and paint it back on I end up where I wanted to be.

I havn't even been opening them back up in TrueSpace after Lith.  I saved the models, and exported the UV maps and did a quick and dirty paint shop texture for them.  Then put them BACK into Lith to see how it would turn out.  It looked fine in Lith, so I then saved it as a .cob file.  Didn't touch TS again (I shudder at the thought of opening that program), and just converted the new Textured .cob file to .pof.  Then there were no lights anywhere, and PCS Couldn't find the textures.  And Modelview just crashed every time.  

[B}

BTW it's .pof not .pos all though there are times you make think that your model really is a POS[/B]

Must be my mind saying "Stop torturing yourself with that POS!"

[karajorma]

Originally posted by CainFortea
The thruster question in Bobboau's faq doesn't answer one question though...what is the thruster suposed to be?  Do I model some kind of cone where the thrusters should be, and glue a light to it?  Or is it just a plain ole light sitting at a certain spot?

You need a cone with a light.

Originally posted by CainFortea
I havn't even been opening them back up in TrueSpace after Lith.

That's your mistake. Lith makes a complete pig's ear of the hierarchy. You need to open it up in TS and using trueview rearrange the hierarchy. Even if you dislike TS we're talking about 2-3 minutes worth of work tops and you'll only need to click a couple of icons since you'll be spending most of your time in Truview.

[CainFortea]

Originally posted by karajorma


You need a cone with a light.




That's your mistake. Lith makes a complete pig's ear of the hierarchy. You need to open it up in TS and using trueview rearrange the hierarchy. Even if you dislike TS we're talking about 2-3 minutes worth of work tops and you'll only need to click a couple of icons since you'll be spending most of your time in Truview.

Thanks Karajorma, I'm finishing up on the remake of that ship now, in Rhino.  I'll see if that works. hopefully!

[Setekh]

Welcome to HLP, CainFortea.

[magatsu1]

table editing, quick and easy:

get vp view. double click "sparky" vp. select tables. select ships(table). right click. extract to data-dir.

you will now have the ships table in the tables diretory.

to texture thrusters, use ani.view to get a frame from the thruster animation and save as a pof. if I recall and understand correctly.