Haha, dude I think you read the FSU teams minds before we thought of it. We were just talking about making a cooler nav bouy last night. Now we don't have to.
=== POF data-wise: ===
Well there's not much that could go wrong with a nav bouy because it has basically no POF data.
There's only one thing that seems a bit wrong - in the subobject properties it should be possible to check the 'Draw BSP Debug Info' box and have lots of red and green boxes appear on the model. If this doesn't appear on a model you should go to data>purge BSP cache and resave.
The reason for this is that unless you can see those debug boxes there's a chance there are errors in the data that would cause problematic collisions in game. It's not a problem for the navbouy though as for some reason they've never been solid in game.
=== Texture wise: ===
AWESOME! You're now the third person to ever draw your own texture for a HTL model!
Anyway, about the bump mapping stuff:
FS has two shaders for this: normal mapping and parallax mapping. Each shader takes a different map: "-normal" for the normal map and "-height" for the parallax map. The normal map is something that you generate from either a high poly model or a heightmap (using something like
Crazybump and controls how the lighting reacts to the surface of the texture based on viewing angle, creating the bumped look.
When saving a normal map, you need to use the DDS type of "DXT5_NM" which you can create using the DDS photoshop plugin from Nvidia.
For the heightmap, you shouldn't use one here. Parallax mapping is for complex detail that is too big for normal mapping but too small or complex for actually modelling it in. All it does is shift the texture around to recreate parallax error on textures - kinda like a normal map amplifier.
=== POF data positioning: ===
Also, (Blowfish as well) - positioning data in PCS2 is VERY easy. Lets just say you wanted to place a gunpoint at the front right wing of a fighter. You'd first switch to Orthographic view (wireframe cube next to an eye on the top menu bar), go to a side view (view->right) and switch to wireframe view. This is just to enable you to see what you're doing more clearly.
Create the gunpoint and give it a forward pointing normal. It should appear in the centre of the model to begin with, so now we move it. Click the third box with a blue plane on it on the top menu. This controls the plane along which you can manually move the point. The one you've selected creates an imaginary plane that goes through the model along where the models mirror line would usually be - front to back, top to bottom. You can see this grid if you turn on the grid view (to the left of the textured, untextured and wireframe buttons).
Now in this view hover the mouse somewhere close to the gunpoint and hold ctrl while dragging. Drag the gunpoint to the position of the modelled gun. Switch to a top view, and select the first cube with the blue plane. This creates an imaginary movement plane that goes front to back, left to right and should again be plainly obvious in the gridview mode. Again hold ctrl and drag it around to the right spot, and that should be it.
Experiment with these controls and you'll find positioning data will become piss easy. Incidentally, right clicking while holding ctrl will move the object only along the axis perpendicular to the plane you have selected.
Hmm, this turned out a bit longer than expected.
