[SeeNeYe]

  stupid me

Finally, all went right since I put both "helper" and "firepoints" at the same place as the turret's arm pivot point. Anyway, we've got to be careful about the normals of the 2 main dummies (which depends of the view from where we create them) and obviously about the firepoint dummies. I'm learning... ^^

One more thing about resizing : we must reset the positions of the 2 mains dummies to the turret's arm pivot point.

[varsaigen]

Great tutorial. But one thing that seems left out when it comes to heirarchy... Debris. Where do they go on the heirarchy? I noticed subsystems, turrets, destroyed variants of those... but no ship debris.

So, as it is suggested for modelers to have debris (realism) rather than magically evaporating ships (saves the enviroment ), where on the hierarchy would they go?

And, as I saw in a Blue Planet video, a massive destroyer dies, breaking apart in half, and each of those halves continues to crack and shatter. Would one be able to do this in Hierarchy, by having, say, "Debris 1 and Debris 2" and having each halves' neighboring debris branch off like with the turrets and helpers?

[FUBAR-BDHR]

debris go on the top level just like detail0 1 2 etc except start with debris.  Same with the live debris (the ones that appear when you say blow a turret off).  They are named debris-<subobject> if there is one piece or debris-<subobject>xx where xx is 01, 02, 03 etc. 

Remember there is a limit of 32 per ship.  That' 32 total so if you have 20 live debirs pieces you only have 12 left for regular. 

[varsaigen]

Ah! Ok! Thanks!

[Scooby_Doo]

Remember there is a limit of 32 per ship.  That' 32 total so if you have 20 live debirs pieces you only have 12 left for regular.

Roh Roh....

[Kusanagi]

Wait I've had no problem with multipart turrets.  I simply get the coordinates of the firepoint from Max and enter them into PCS2.  You have to adjust for the axis differences but it works just fine. 

If you center the "firepoints" helper on the turret arm pivot point, then the individual fire points will not show up correctly in PCS2, but ingame they are correct.

This is true. I remember it being a huge deal when trying to work with multiparts on the Taiidan ships.

[Spicious]

That's no longer the case.
Firepoints of multipart turrets should be parented to the barrels grouped as multifirepoints (or something like that) now.

[zookeeper]

I'd like to post a link to my maxscripts here too, since they can be a great help. Firstly, you don't have to worry about reseting XForm until you're actually exporting the model, so you can setup object hierarchies as soon as you want and most importantly don't have to have XForms reset in your working file. Secondly, you can setup multipart turrets in Max, meaning no setting up of firepoint normals in pcs2 or manually calculating uvecs and fvecs is needed, which can be a massive time-saver when converting capships.

[zookeeper]

That's no longer the case.
Firepoints of multipart turrets should be parented to the barrels grouped as multifirepoints (or something like that) now.

So are all the changes like that you've made documented somewhere? If they are, then I haven't found it.

Also I'd really suggest keeping backwards compatibility for that sort of stuff if at all possible.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I'd just like to point out I'm not a modeler but that not resetting xform along the way thing can get you in trouble.  I've seen a few models where people have failed to do that and well they are totally unconvertible.  Stacks 20 or 30 modifiers deep and all you get out of them in the long run are swiss cheese if PCS2 will even read the .dae.  In the end they are so bad it was decided it was easier to toss them and start over.

[Spicious]

So are all the changes like that you've made documented somewhere? If they are, then I haven't found it.

No, but there's a commit log.

Also I'd really suggest keeping backwards compatibility for that sort of stuff if at all possible.

It was changed to be consistent with the game.