some basic bits - I can;t remember how much of this IP gives in his guide...
- Glue all lights as sibling! - otherwise you get some wierd 'empty layers in the model hierarchy
- Triangulate - this is not necassirlly true for all faces / models, but untriangulated faces may be curved, which obviously warps the textures, but (more importantly) can result in there being no collision detection on the face (not sure if it's the same in IWar2)
Ok;
- You need TS obviously - the object you create will contain all the LODs, debris objects, etc used by the compiler. Because TS doesn't really preserve model hierarchy, we need to glue a light onto every object (except the main hull for LOD0) or else it sort of gets 'merged' with the main hull.
- Ok, first step is LODing. Simply, you have your first hull object, etc. For the LODs1-3 (where LOD0 is highest detail), you glue a light to the hull and name the combo detail1 (to 3). Glue the LOD objects as sibling to the LOD0 hull, and ensure they are all at the same co-ords.
- Turrets.. well, there's a bunch of posts about that here, and KillMeNows tutorial, which pretty much explain it all.
- Debris - Same as LODs, except thes object names are (all) 'debris' - place the debris at the point where it is 'spawned' upon the ships destruction. The ' ,1 ' etc added by TS is ignored in conversion, anyway. Subobject specific debris is named subobjectname-destroyed, and glued onto the position of the hull it is expected to be. I think live debris - i.e. fragments blown away - is the same, except change debris to 'destroyed'.... I'm a little rusty, so check an existing model of IPs tutorial.
-Thrusters are named 'thrusterxx', where xx is a number. Thruster01a is glued to LOD0, thruster01b to LOD1, etc. The a,b,c,d suffix applies to all objects - look at the big turrets on an Orion, for example. The texture applied should be named 'thruster01'- the actual in-game colour (& animation) is determined by the 'species' flag in the tbl, anyway. Map the map exactly as it should appear on the model... best to use the first frame of the thruster ani. Also, IIRC, the axis of the thruster corresponds to the point where the flame ends at 0 power, and the actual thruster object is the full size of the thruster (meaning it scales between the axis and the full thruster model).
