[Vasudan Admiral]

Kazan the fact remains that that was a known BUG with a weird export format - originally the only export format it had. There were complaints about it all over the blender forums, so it wasn't exactly hard to figure out what would have caused the PCS errors. Back then blender was in its infancy - as was PCS1. May I remind you of the massive collision detection errors that PCS1 had up until after 1.3 or something? That screwed up nearly everything that went through it.

That PCS1 bug has long since been fixed, and we don't still hate PCS2 because of it now do we? If we did imagine how incredibly stupid you'd be calling all of us. The same applies in reverse. Not only was that bug fixed in the very next version, but we stopped using the DXF format years ago. Proof of this is that the DXF format does not preserve UVs or textures - yet we're producing textured models from blender.

Look, if blender models are as bad as you seem to think they must be, please by all means find the errors in the triton, lucifer, loki, zeus, aeolus, tc-tri, uglies, or the upcoming amazon drone, aten and horus. All of them have either been built from scratch or heavily modified in blender, so they must be full of problems!

Until you find such problems, stop going all jack-thompson about blender, because I think by now my stuff should have made it blatantly obvious that there are no such errors.

[nexiusevaro]

bleh

anyway... back to the exporter a sec if that's cool.....

couple noob questions... just getting around to working through the texturing process and am using the blender > exporter > cob > pcs2 approach.

first off, can blender handle dds files?... it doesnt seem to like them and i couldn't find a plugin.  Went with making a .bmp copy of the .dds file and managed to paste it on the model in blender last night.   When i brought it up in pcs2 it wouldn't show the texture - couldn't get pcs2 to browse to a texture file either..... (sorry noobness)

When using the exporter is it best to global import or open the cob file in pcs2?   Is there anything additionally needed for textures to go from blender/.cob to pcs2 with the exporter?  (Ie. table edit or exporting textures with a blender command before saving or some such)

Finally, hardly related but since everyones stoppin by... the only method of texturing i can find for blender is to seam>unwrap>browse to file, adjust etc.   Is it best to break a more complex model into pieces Ie. hull, engines, wings or do you have to just build complex seams and leave it as one object is one method better tahn the other when using the exp approach?   

thanks again for the exporter Water, it works real slick so far for me...

just gettin started tho =)

nex

[Kazan]

May I remind you of the massive collision detection errors that PCS1 had up until after 1.3 or something? That screwed up nearly everything that went through it.

to be fair every other converter had worse problems - blender wasn't the best tool.  The simple fact of the matter is i'll never trust blender for bug reports... real any program that .cob isn't native too will always get the "check that truespace does this too" on any bug reports...

just wait until I get around to working on Collada XML support (busy with class coding.. have to write a simple unix shell tommorow) and we won't have this problem any more

[Water]

When using the exporter is it best to global import or open the cob file in pcs2?   Is there anything additionally needed for textures to go from blender/.cob to pcs2 with the exporter?  (Ie. table edit or exporting textures with a blender command before saving or some such)

Finally, hardly related but since everyones stoppin by... the only method of texturing i can find for blender is to seam>unwrap>browse to file, adjust etc.   Is it best to break a more complex model into pieces Ie. hull, engines, wings or do you have to just build complex seams and leave it as one object is one method better tahn the other when using the exp approach?   

thanks again for the exporter Water, it works real slick so far for me...

just gettin started tho =)

nex

dds - no.
It may be in the next blender (I hope). For Blender the texture in the uv window is the filename that gets exported. It dosn't need a real material assigned. Also the file type can be bmp in Blender. As long as PCS2 can see either a  dds, tga, jpg or pcx.

At the moment I still go through Truespace. (For now)
For most stuff I unwrap in parts, then move it out of the uv square. Once everything is seamed and unwraps undistorted, then I do a full unwrap. Check for relative check size across all parts.  After that comes the cram everything back in the  uv square. If possible use one texture per ship, and one texture is actually many (diffuse, glow, shine, normal)

Write out a uv map
Save an occlusion map.
For a fighter - may use the texture paint tools to generate a concept texture as a base for gimp/photoshop.

[nexiusevaro]

awesome

thanks clear response to cryptic questions, i'll try things out again tonight

nex

[Vasudan Admiral]

to be fair every other converter had worse problems - blender wasn't the best tool.  The simple fact of the matter is i'll never trust blender for bug reports... real any program that .cob isn't native too will always get the "check that truespace does this too" on any bug reports...

That's a different issue - I agree that bugs that might be related to a particular programs export of a format should definitely be checked by the program that format is native to. In the past whenever I encountered an oddity or possible error I would do a test model entirely made in truespace to ensure the error wasn't being introduced by outside sources.

It's just the "Blender being on the permanent **** list is like AOL being on the perm **** list." attitude that is unhelpful considering every glitch I've ever had has been because of truespace or a model someone else has made in a different app.

I'm not asking you to like blender, but please stop scaring away new blender users by announcing it produces bad models and constantly bashing it for outdated reasons. It's become practically a different program since those early days, and it's rock solid stable. Also, because it is free and can now save perfecly stable cobs that can be directly opened by PCS2, I would say that it's currently the very best platform for FS ship building.

[Water]

<a href="http://files.filefront.com/truespace+FS2+22feb07+exptzip/;9680718;/fileinfo.html" title="truespace_FS2_22feb07-expt.zip">truespace_FS2_22feb07-expt.zip[/url]

Now you can export Blender lamps (for firepoints) Turreting just got so much easier.

Note: If the last object selected is a Lamp, then that is all that will be exported. Treat as unstable for now and check your work. Any problems - please post. 

Also each mesh object can have a different autosmoothing angle set.

[Getter Robo G]

I assume you put this in the Plugins folder for blender? I checked option in menu but didn't see .cob listed?

[Vasudan Admiral]

Cool - thanks.

That just leaves the main remaining feature as the ability to use blenders limited smoothgroup support to the fullest, which would basically just be being able to tell if a face is set to smooth/auto-smooth or faceted. Not a great system, but it should be enough for most purposes.

Getter: put it in "Blender\.blender\scripts" and restart the app. Also make sure you have python 2.5 installed, or else it won't work.

[Water]

I assume you put this in the Plugins folder for blender? I checked option in menu but didn't see .cob listed?

It goes in the scripts folder (Blender\.blender\scripts)
Here is a Blend file of yamato <a href="http://files.filefront.com/yamato5azip/;9681016;/fileinfo.html" title="yamato5a.zip">yamato5a.zip[/url]
You will need to use bmp or tga for blender.
The Export is under File-->Export-->Truespace 22feb07

[Water]

That just leaves the main remaining feature as the ability to use blenders limited smoothgroup support to the fullest, which would basically just be being able to tell if a face is set to smooth/auto-smooth or faceted. Not a great system, but it should be enough for most purposes.

Could you post a link to a Blend file with the sort of smoothing you would like to export. Just don't expect results this month (or next) 

[Vasudan Admiral]

Sure.

Here's what the smoothing is set to do in the attached blend:


Note that the cylinder on the left is a separate mesh from the other two that have been joined it's because blender currently handles smoothing quite stupidly. You can set a whole object to be either smoothed or faceted, and can then assign either state to any individual faces in the model, or you can set the whole model to smoothed, then turn on autofaceted. Once set to autofacet, you can set individual faces to be faceted but can't set them to be smoothed. Autofacet smoothing also does not display in the editing view and can only be seen on render.

Quite an ugly little system really. I hope it gets fixed. :\

Anyway, in the scene, the smoothed cylinder has had the smooth applied to the whole object. The other single mesh has been set to smooth, autofaceted and then the cylinder on the right selected and set to faceted. It's not a terribly good example, but it gives the idea.

Oh, and if you know most if not all of this already, sorry - just ignore me.

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Water]

Oh, and if you know most if not all of this already, sorry - just ignore me.

Well I guess I wasn't specific enough 
Was more after a subobject (fighter hull etc). But after thinking about it, you probably did smoothing in Truespace?

So the Truespace options are solid, smooth and auto(angle). Each one is a seperate material, except auto(angle) which gets one material per angle.

Without getting fancy the best that I can aim for is Solid, and Smooth or AutoSmooth.  Also with normal mapping how relevant is smoothing?

A hierarchical version is done. Full turrets in PCS2. I'm not sure whether to find a way to detect if the blend has hierarchy or just have a popup giving a choice between flat or hierarchical.

http://files.filefront.com/truespace+FS2+Hierarchy+etzip/;9692727;/fileinfo.html
*Has only been tested on one model*
Needs Heirarchy to function. In Blender, CTRL-p to make the last object selected the parent and ALT-p to clear parent.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Once again: Awesome.

Seems to work fine for me, and as for which one to use, detecting it or a popup is fine either way.

Smoothing: Unfortunately smoothing is still a very important factor for ships with curves. The specular highlights on the normals make smoothing glitches horribly obvious. :\

[nexiusevaro]

I have been trying to export a fighter using the hierarchy function to place fire points.  I was sure i saw the lamps go thru the first few times i tried it and now i can't seem to get it set up so they show.  I have looked about a bit for a good description of the autogen feature in pcs2 and haven't had much luck.   Am i trying to work the exporter in a way it wasn't intended? 

Basically, i have been trying to set up the hierarchy and export it such that autogen will recognize and place firepoints, and the hull, other subobjects appropriately.

Any advice, tutorials, or the like anyone would recommend?  I realize this is kinda a new approach so there may not be much out there, any thoughts would be appreciated though.   

Here's a cap of my last attempt to look at too. 

Fairly screwed up, I know.  If I could get a look at a listing of what autogen looks for to set up the different components I think i could do a bit better.

Thanks

Nex

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Vasudan Admiral]

Ok, from your screenshot there I can see two issues:

1) In your blender hierarchy screen I see all your guns look like they are lamps glued (or parented in blender terms) to objects (the black 3 axis arrow symbols). Since lamps aren't counted as geometry, this creates object groups that have no actual geometry in them - and so PCS2 ignores them. As such "Lamp" and all its children objects will be ignored.

To fix this, just parent all your autogen lights directly to the object they're supposed to be attached to - for example, gun firepoints are supposed to be attached to the main hull so you parent the gun firepoint autogen lamps directly to the 'mainhull' object.

2) You need to select all the objects that you want to export before exporting - you can select stuff in that hierarchy window by holding shift and clicking all the icons of the objects you want. In your pic it shows that "debris01' - 03 and 'shieldmesh' have not been selected, and so they weren't exported with the rest.

=====

About autogen though, I'm not exactly sure what the naming format is for creating gun firepoints via autogen - in the past I've always just added these after pof conversion.

Also on the topic of autogen - you no longer need thruster geometry - FSO can still display them, but they look really ugly compared to the thruster glows used instead now, so basically for a fighter, there isn't anything you really need to set up in the autogen at all.

All you need is the main hull, shield, LODs and debris. ALL the other POF data can be manually entered in PCS2 once it's been converted - the autogen is just there to help save time with stuff that might take ages doing manually - none of which you need for a fighter sized craft.

[Water]

I tend to agree with VA, once the heirarchy is done in Blender (for a fighter) the rest can be taken care of in PCS2.

I didn't see any way for guns, missile points and glow.
Engine glow and the subsystems can be exported ok. EngGlow01-00, SPCL=communication, etc.

The engine glows and special point lamps can be parented directly to the mainhull. Just change the name of the lamps.  eg engine glow lamp 1 and 2 would be renamed to:
EngGlow01-00
EngGlow01-01
The engine subsystem lamp  would be renamed to:
SPCL=engine

In object mode press n (name) - ok it doesn't stand for name    (press n again to make the dialog box go away)

In PCS2 you will need to set  to radius for these lamps 

[nexiusevaro]

thanks,

above suggestions worked well.  I got a good majority of the pcs setup stuff done (and quite a bit in blender sent thru successfully...)  I did a pof export to test and
everything came up ok in modelview. 

update: 3 08 08   success!  (read: not as bad as my whining about how bad it was gonna be)

I did notice an offset on my shield mesh when it came up in pcs, I countered it by moving the shield mesh farther forward than it should have been in blender before exporting and it's where it's s'posed to be now.  One other note, change the scale preference to 1 in pcs2 if you are not using ts at all, or yer ship will be 20x too big.    So, i figure its like this....(with the appropriate naustolgic announcer voice)

Setting up a mod folder and messing around with some model/table changes between the 2 FOW ship sets I used as a test environment : 2 hours
Exporting and reexporting & adjusting and changing things in order to chase down my scale problem: 1 hour (prolly longer  )
Trying to remember how to fred again (using an old guide): 20 minutes, a plate of cookies, and maybe a few drinks

Not ever opening TS and yet being able to fly my first ship around aimlessly in freespace: priceless     

this truespaceless (tm) moment brought to you by VA and Water

anyway, thx much for the exporter and advice Water - and yer help as well VA!

nex