[TrenchardsLoveSock]

Hello all.  After leeching your free game and all of the hard work you do I thought I'd try modelling just to see if I could put something back in.  I tried Blender, but it was like learning to drive using an F1 car; hugely powerful and impossible to control.  I have now downloaded Truespace 3.2 and have, with the help of WeatherOp's tutorial and IPAndrew's guide created my first ship and started tweaking it.

Before I go off on a tangent and develop bad habits, I thought I should ask a couple of questions.  Some of the terminology might be wrong because I'm doing this from work so bear with me.

1.  I had a play with the 'glue as child' and 'boolean union' tools.  Am I right in assuming that, in order to cut down on polys, everything needs to be unioned rather than glued before exporting?

2.  With boolean intersects and subtractions do the 'spare' polys dissapear for good, or am I going to be left with some invisible polys reappearing on conversion?

3.  The boolean operations seem to be irreversible.  Is this true or am I missing some cunningly hidden sub-feature?

4.  I tried importing my .cob into Blender and it seemed to have split all of the glued items apart and laid them in neat lines.  Is this me being a biff, or just vagaries of the import process?

There'll probably be more questions later (unless I get flamed into a dribbling mess).

Thanks for your help.

[aldo_14]

1/ Boolean tools tend to be hideously dodgy, AFAIK, and might seriously screw the model up.  I've never used TS for proper modelling, but IIRC the general consensus was to avoid boolean operations wherever possible.
2/ See 1
3/ I believe they are irreversable, yes
4/I think it's an import thing, not sure.

[Flipside]

The old FS2 Engine required that things like fighters were one solid mesh with all polygons welded. That was usually where the Boolean stuff came in and, as Aldo said, it was a source of more problems than it solved.

SCP is actually a lot more forgiving, you don't have to weld everything in the same subobject together, which makes a lot of boolean stuff not really needed now.

The only way to reverse a Boolean is to Undo everything you did since as well unfortunately.

And finally, yes, that sounds very much like an import thing.

[TrenchardsLoveSock]

The old FS2 Engine required that things like fighters were one solid mesh with all polygons welded. That was usually where the Boolean stuff came in and, as Aldo said, it was a source of more problems than it solved.

SCP is actually a lot more forgiving, you don't have to weld everything in the same subobject together, which makes a lot of boolean stuff not really needed now.

So, if I mirror things for symmetry of extrusions/detail, it's ok just to glue as sibling/child?

I was worried about poly counts, but looking at it logically, creating a union between two flat faces only saves 2 polys per union, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

If booleans screw things up, what is the best way of making 'holes' in things such as engine intakes/exhausts etc?

Thanks to both of you so far.

[Flipside]

I'm not 100% up on Truespace, but any parts that are in the same 'group' will be treated as a single sub-object, just remember that everything that represents the main 'hull' of the ship (not subsytems etc) need to be in the top layer of groups with a light as a terminator, as far as I'm aware, it doesn't matter how many seperate parts that model is made from as long as it doesn't include turrets etc.

Therefore, you could have a set of groups like, 'MainbodyPart1, MainbodyPart2' and as long as they are in the same group, FS2 will treat them as a single object named after the title of the group they are in.

That's why a barrel has to be a subgroup in a gun, if the were both in the same group, Freespace thinks they are one solid object

[TrenchardsLoveSock]

So this is what I gather from your posts:

The hierarchy settings (that I've not ventured near yet) are the settings that completely define the structure.  Using booleans makes everything one big lump and may cause conversion problems while 'glue as' creates the hierarchy as you go along.

'Glue as sibling' makes things part of the same group, while 'glue as child' makes them part of a sub group.

If that is wrong then please correct me as I'd hate to create a model that I like but can't use!

One more thing:  Why do you need the light as a terminator?

[Flipside]

I'm pretty much certain that's correct. Boolean will cause errors and can also wierd artifacts like 2-vertex polygons that really don't sit well with the converter, but yes, a barrel is a child of a turret, a turret is a child of the hull etc

The light as a Terminator is kind of like a full stop at the end of a sentence, it tells the system that this is the end of the objects at this level. Admittedly that could be done from grouping alone, but iirc, it's a bit of a throwover from the original command-line conversion programs.

[Janos]

first time always sucks

[TrenchardsLoveSock]

first time always sucks

That's not what my wife said!!

Actually I'm quite enjoying it now that I've found TS.  Of course, All I'm doing at the moment is messing around with cubes and cylinders.  Once I try to texture it and make it work I've got no doubt that I'll be reaching for the whiskey and sleeping tablets!

Still wish I could've got on with Blender, the potential was huge.

[Flipside]

I'm so glad you said that, I was having to sit on my fingers from stopping myself from typing 'Only if you ask nicely'

[chief1983]

As far as irrerversibility goes, it's probably a good idea to save your own models incrementally.  It's the way that I've seen a couple modelers handling things so far.

[Nuke]

avoid format hopping at all costs