[EAD_Agamemnon]

Okay. First of all I got the idea of toying around and made myself a space paddle steam boat. It's not all that complex, particularly the hull itself. I have it more or less assigned a hierarchy, but I wanted to make sure that I could actually use the model before I went further. Some models I've made PCS wont use because it goes over the polygon limit of 20 vertices in some places. Now for my problem...

I open PCS. I go to the Conversion pull down menu and chose COB to POF. I select the ship from the directory. It acts like its working for a second then the main PCS window goes white and I get an hourglass that wont go away. The program fails to respond at all. I have to shut it down using CTRL + ALT + DEL.

Now I KNOW this ship has few polys than some of my other models...but its not working. I was looking forward to using the ship and watching wing mates get shot down by a 19th/early 20th century paddle steamer complete with 7 cannons and 6 defensive gatling guns.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Did you try triangulating it? And does it have a UV projection applied? (cubic, planar, spherical, full on UV map - anything so long as you're not trying to convert un UVed geometry, cos I know that can cause crashes)

If neither of those help, upload the cob and I'll have a look, because it would probably indicate a geometry error.

[EAD_Agamemnon]

I even tried it triangulated. As for UV projection I dont think I have the stuff to do that with even if I knew how to do it. I loaded up one of my other older models with no problem. The one giving me trouble has lots of small parts. About 50 columns or so that 'help support the awnings' on the decks. A couple flights of stairs.

It dont even tell me anything when I try to load...it just sits idle like it tries to load it but it cant.

[Vasudan Admiral]

What program are you working in? If truespace, you do the UV projection by selecting your object and pressing the blue&white checkered cube/plane button on the bottom toolbar.



This will assign the selected object a UV projection (how the textures will be applied) but doesn't assign any textures. It's probably a good idea to just give it a simple one:
To assign a texture (in TS6 at least), go to the material editor (the paint pallet - bottom toolbar). Expand the colour window; the red line points it out below: (Note that by default the colour will be a solid grey colour - not a texture. To make it a texture, right-click the preview in the colour window and from the colour shaders box that pops up, select the caligari logo - "texture map")



To change the image used as your texture, right click the caligari logo texture in the colour window, and it will bring up a browse dialogue. Find a nice and boring one and use that to test with.

[EAD_Agamemnon]

Problem there. I'm using TS3...cant afford to buy a more current one. I looked and it doesnt appear to have that option in it.

EDIT: It does. Just wasnt where I thought it was.

[EAD_Agamemnon]

BAH! I tried the UV thing on the triangulated version and it didnt work....PCS still just hangs there all bleach blank.

Tried it on an untriangulated version....with the UV....now it dont freeze at least...now I gotta find where i got more than 20 sides to a polygon. I can only ASSUME that the more than 20 points includes the 4 points that surround the columns....if thats so I'm over the limit by like 50+ on the 2 lower decks. Since I'm not sure...I'll post a screen of the ship. NOTE: The stock-TS3 textures are merely substitutes until I get it into MODVIEW and there I can give it better..though not proper ones since I have no texture-making skills or tools.




Do I have too many columns on this one? I loaded just this part of the ship and it gives me the >20 error. Needless to say itd cause a problem with the ship hull too. If I have too I can remove them..or at least most and lleave the ones on the corners.

[Scooby_Doo]

Now thats a neat ship 

[EAD_Agamemnon]

Thank You. ATM I'm trying to carefully remove some of the columns by starting with every other one. Just the DECK section alone gives PCS a hernia. If I try to do it too quick....TS3 has a coronary and I gotta CTRL ALT DEL it to end program....

[Vasudan Admiral]

Crikey, never seen such jagged edges as in that top pic - I think something's wrong with your display settings there. :\

As for the >20 error, that means you either have more than 20 verticies forming a single face, or  more than 20 verticies all connected by edges to a single verticie. That it brings this error up when the thing is triangulated suggests the latter, as a 20vert face would be split into triangles.

I suspect it may be caused by having all those columns attached to the deck/roof parts. Can you get a screenie of what it looks like once triangulated?

[EAD_Agamemnon]

I'm not running my old GForce2 64meg at 1600x1200 is why....

Ok. Ill post the triangulated version (with the columns) TS3 is being a headache with my trying to remove them. So I'm going back to an early version of the decks and removing the columns (the columns are 1 entire thing per tier....so Ill just delete them) and put back on the substitute textures.

Notable it is a mess.


Even the no-columns made PCS crap...onto the hull i go now

[Vasudan Admiral]

Ah - ok, that confirms it - the problem is having those columns attached to the underside of the roof. What it means is that instead of just being two triangles, the underside of the roof becomes rather polygon heavy. Have a look:


The top one is what it should be like - two separate pieces, and the bottom is what it is. Basically, at least two verts on each of the columns that touches the roof is connecting to a vert on the corner of the roof. That's easily enough to break the <20 limit.

[EAD_Agamemnon]

it did that even before it was triangulated...

the deck version w/o the columns PCS accepts...now my prob is prob with the hull....or....the guns....

I'll have to fiddle with this tomorrow....nearly 10pm atm here and i got to leave at 4:30 for work at 6

[EAD_Agamemnon]

okay I tried loading just the hull into PCS...no problems....the steam plant...no problems...the weapons...no prob...
but when I load the entire thing (the above mentioned are not merged to each other as the others would be destroyable subobjects of the hull itself)...it wont work and gives me the >20 thingamajiggawopper

[bizzybody]

If you're doing boolean joins, it's easy to get extra vertexes that're really hard to see without zooming way in. trueSpace often doesn't like to do boolean operations on objects that're perfectly aligned along edges or faces.

IF a mod would do a Sticky thread or better yet, a trueSpace subforum, I'd be happy to post stuff on how to do stuff in tS3.2 that's not normally possible using just the tools available in the program's interface.

I posted a mini-tutorial a while back on how to triangulate a single face in tS3. It takes a few steps but gets the same results as the Add Edge tool in later versions.

tS3.2 tends to spaz out often, usually at the worst moment. SAVE OFTEN! When it goes wonky, 99.999% of the time it also flushes its undo buffer.

Some of my olde stuff I did with older versions of trueSpace. http://members.aceweb.com/gregg1/oldweb/

As for the jagged edges on the render, he needs to enable anti-aliasing. To enable that, rightclick the Render group, that's between the Display group and the View group, down in the bottom right corner. (Unless you're one of those top-menu weirdos... )

[Vasudan Admiral]

Doesn't look like it's just missing AA - look closer at the grid compared to the mesh. It's like it's actively....jaggying it up. :\

As to the problem, post the cob and I'll take a look. It sounds to me like you've got multiple errors all probably relating to booleans.

====

And this is the final straw. As soon as the HTL Loki is complete, I'm going to begin writing that Blender tutorial so people don't have to deal with this sort of TS-3.2-related rubbish when they're only trying to learn to model. Modeling itself is difficult enough to learn without the program you're using doing it's level best to ruin your model and/or your sanity at every turn.

Blender is free as well and kicks the crap out of TS 3.2 in every way possible.

[FlareBaffled]

Boolean functions in just about ANY 3D program will cause the creation of lots of unwanted verts. This is one of the reasons why the SCP is such a benefit. The new game versions allow you to intersect parts without htings blowing up. Saves hugely on issues like this, and makes booleans unecessary.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Agreed....to an extent. I don't like Booleans in general (I never use them actually), but also it's generally bad modeling practice to assemble ships out of multiple separate objects. It causes more conversion problems than it solves, causes UV mapping area wastage and is a bit lazy really.
There was a debate between me and Scooby Doo about this a while back, here.

Essentially; yes having ships made out of separate pieces makes them a bit easier to take apart and debug, but if you build your ship out of a solid mesh, you shouldn't ever get the those errors in the first place!

[EAD_Agamemnon]

Not sure if I understand this all correctly....but here's my understanding starting with how I currently have the model.

The section with the decks: 1 separate uni-body part of the hull....the version w/o the columns PCS accepts since the one w/ gave PCS fits.

The engine section (the 2 towers on it): PCS accepts this just fine w/o trouble.

The hull/wheels: PCS gives no trouble with these either. The hull and wheels are seperate pieces.

The above are not glued together but are simply grouped objects, though each is composed of multiple glued-together polygons to make one single shape.
When I group all the objects together, PCS craps out. The version with the models PCS would have white outs and not do squat...the version w/o the columns just gives the >20 error.

How can I get said error when the mentioned individual sections of the ship pass okay, and when simply grouped together to form a whole do they cause a fit? I dont mean to repeat myself, but just wanting to be sure I got out correctly what I had done and what the problem was.

[Vasudan Admiral]

but also it's generally bad modeling practice to assemble ships out of multiple separate objects. It causes more conversion problems than it solves

Told you already.
And:

As to the problem, post the cob and I'll take a look.

[Getter Robo G]

Question (don't bite my head off pls!)

If a ship converted before to .pof but I had to break it up in order to cleanly edit some stuff out and now am stuck with 52 objects off one of 5 main parts and it fails conversion cause of this, HOW can I merge all those objects into one part again? (Using only ts3.2) is it possible? I tried union but nothing happens.

Irony of Ironies, I just realized with my latest one I'm probably in the top ten for most amount of conversions done  for Fs2