[Colonol Dekker]

Due to a freakishly heavy night out a week ago, i fell asleep on the bus and had my bag pinched. Bye bye  Nintendo 3DS and Samsung Netbook  .

I used it for all my modelling, VA work, and slow progress to mastering skinning.
Upon realising i need to re-acquire all my FS2 related tools, VP managers, pof editors, blah blah blah. I noticed there isn't a sticky for people.


Sooooo.............. Can has a recommended minimum working toolset thread?



EDIT --

SCRATCH THAT

[bobbtmann]

Wow, that's awful. I hope you had your work backed up. Nothing worse than losing the time spent on your work.

[Colonol Dekker]

Yep, lost damn near all of it apart from a few old cob files and some conceptual stuff.


More miffed about my ZSnes saves to be honest. Was nearly through Super Contra

[Scooby_Doo]

Oh god, that sucks 

[Colonol Dekker]

I know, I used to save a state at the beginning of each level. Never used any cheats either.

It took me ages as a man. When i was nine-ten i could plough through it.



On (semi) Topic.

Scooby, what are your minimum tools / VP Packagers of choice?

I use(d) notepad, PCS2, Photoshop/Paintshop Pro with NVidia tools (for DDS) Truespace, Max for baking, and Lithunwrap for (learning) UV mapping.

[Droid803]

Ever single time someone uses truespace, god kills a baby.
Think of the babies. Don't use truespace.
Especially since you actually have Max already. You might as well use it.

PCS2 (w/DAE) for making/editing pofs, Photoshop (w/DDS) for textures effects etc, 3DS Max (w/DAE) for modelling baking uvmapping, Audacity for music/voice, QVP for opening vps.

All you really need (to make a total conversion even).

Substitute GIMP for Photoshop and Blender for Max if you want an all-free-program loadout.

Since I hate packing VPs I have no preference on the tool. They all suck cause the format sucks.

[Water]

I use(d) notepad, PCS2, Photoshop/Paintshop Pro with NVidia tools (for DDS) Truespace, Max for baking, and Lithunwrap for (learning) UV mapping.

If you haven't learned how to unwrap with Lithunwrap by now, then it might be trying to tell you something.

Blenders unwrapper is very good. The Max one is probably good too. Lithunwrap *was* good. But that was a long time ago.

The newer ones do the job faster, have more unwrapping tools and give better feedback.

[Rga_Noris]

I would also add that, if you have not already become used to modeling in MAX, then start with Blender. Not because it is free, but because it seems to be a generally smoother transition from .blend to .dae to .pof. Use Blender 2.49b.

I base this off of a reputation I had for fixing meshes. After I got the Hatty and Cain working in game with no errors, many people contacted me to resolve collision issues and many other problems... by and large, most were MAX users. The way I fixed their issues was by simply importing to blender, and then exporting to DAE and then converting to POF. Did not change a thing with the model, but some how worked flawlessly.

[Scooby_Doo]

Well since you have max, it's unwrapper is quite good.  Learn the stitch command in the unwrapper (hotkey s), it'll make things even easier and faster.   Also don't forget the max script thread stickied too.
For vp's i use the old dos vpmake, it might not open vp's but it makes them fast and easy.

I would also add that, if you have not already become used to modeling in MAX, then start with Blender. Not because it is free, but because it seems to be a generally smoother transition from .blend to .dae to .pof. Use Blender 2.49b.

I base this off of a reputation I had for fixing meshes. After I got the Hatty and Cain working in game with no errors, many people contacted me to resolve collision issues and many other problems... by and large, most were MAX users. The way I fixed their issues was by simply importing to blender, and then exporting to DAE and then converting to POF. Did not change a thing with the model, but some how worked flawlessly.

It's probably not max, rather the collada exporter.  Outside of forgetting to reset the x-form or smoothing correctly 

[Droid803]

I would also add that, if you have not already become used to modeling in MAX, then start with Blender. Not because it is free, but because it seems to be a generally smoother transition from .blend to .dae to .pof. Use Blender 2.49b.

I base this off of a reputation I had for fixing meshes. After I got the Hatty and Cain working in game with no errors, many people contacted me to resolve collision issues and many other problems... by and large, most were MAX users. The way I fixed their issues was by simply importing to blender, and then exporting to DAE and then converting to POF. Did not change a thing with the model, but some how worked flawlessly.

I've fixed a fair few models myself and I use Max.

The key thing is to not use the direct Max to POF exporter (which, despite Spoon's defense of it, sucks monkey balls and spits out collision and lighting errors like no tomorrow). Max can export to (OpenCollada)DAE just fine. Opening those buggy models, converting them to editable poly, then exporting them fixes all issues.

Never had a collision/lighting-buggy (save bad booleans on the source model....) model in my life that I've converted, and I've converted a fair few models...

The Collada exporter for max forces you to reset X-Form, unlike the Max->Pof exporter (which is why that one spits out an asston of lighting errors).

[rscaper1070]

Speaking of OpenCollada, it looks like Max 2012 is now supported. Woo-Hoo!

[Droid803]

Oh brilliant. Maybe its time to upgrade.