[Sushi]

How does Freespace handle smoothing groups?

Does it use a set angle? Not use them at all? Use what's in the file?

Just something I need to know for my model...



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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[The Claw]

0_0 Ok, I have no idea what you're on about...
 But if this helps, as far as I know, Freespace doesn't modify the model at all, so if you smooth it in whatever program you use and export it, it'll come out like that...


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"Supernova, ya supernova, supernova goes pop
supernova, ya think it's over but the supernova don't stop" PM5K
Death:"Arnold Judas Rimmer... your life is over. You will travel with me to the-"
#knees death in the groin#
Rimmer:"Remember matey, it's only the good that die young"
"Do not fear the chickens. Become one with the chickens. Respect the chickens and... #BOK!# LEG IT!!!"
The Claw- Project Coordinator and modeller of Alternate Reality and official spare wheel of The Perfect Storm...

[wEvil]

i'm not entirely sure.

export a model without any textures and see what faces interpolate with each other.

from viewing that it should answer your question  

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All your quantum physicist are belong to us!

[Sushi]

I have yet to get Cob2Pof to work for me. :|

I'm trying to find a way to do everything without resorting to downloading the terror that is Truespace.

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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[JarC]

 

Originally posted by Sushi:
How does Freespace handle smoothing groups?

Smoothing groups? Whut the heck are these?
Is that some kind of poly collection where the edges between adjacent polys is smoothed out so they don't show as a shaded line?

Ok, I presume these are inside the POF? well, I've read the other suggestions and I fear they won't help...extracting/converting the POF to something you can view external is undoubtedly going to alter the data and prolly not at all going to show whut you want...

However, wEvil is on the right track I think...but try it the other way around is my suggestion...like extract the textures for the model, paint/fill them an single shade of gray and put them in yer data folder.

With the texture in one color, it should reveal whatever FS2 is doing with it without any distortions from converting and differing display/render methods...

?

[This message has been edited by JarC (edited 05-29-2001).]

[Sushi]

I guess I should have cleared this up sooner.  

Smoothing groups are a 3ds convention. Essentially, every face can be assigned to a smoothing group, and edges between faces in the same group are "smoothed" over, so the engine doesn't render a hard line. I just want to know if I can take advantage of them for my FS modeling purposes.

I would have just tested it myself, but I have yet to get COB2POF to successfully import my model.


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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[Nico]

well, I'm using 3ds files too, and unfortunately, it seems that the smoothing groups are not kept at all  , you end up with faceted polys  

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venom2506
Member of the Robotech mod for FS2

and of Hidden Terror, the Shivan campaign

and My own page

[Setekh]

Yep, I just tried it, and I couldn't get any smoothing to work. Sorry dude.

[Sushi]

Oh well...I can still use them for rendering purposes.

Now I just need to get the sucker textured and converted to POF. Hoo boy.  

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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[The Claw]

Are you using Cob2FS2? DOn't forget it has to run in Dos mode...

------------------
"Supernova, ya supernova, supernova goes pop
supernova, ya think it's over but the supernova don't stop" PM5K
Death:"Arnold Judas Rimmer... your life is over. You will travel with me to the-"
#knees death in the groin#
Rimmer:"Remember matey, it's only the good that die young"
"Do not fear the chickens. Become one with the chickens. Respect the chickens and... #BOK!# LEG IT!!!"
The Claw- Project Coordinator and modeller of Alternate Reality and official spare wheel of The Perfect Storm...

[Sushi]

No, I ran it through Kazan's latest Cob2Pof, it gave no errors, just created a POF with nothing in it. Wonderful.
 


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Sushi- the OTHER white meat!

Accelerate your game-Velocity Mod
Sushi's Freespace Zone-Future home of loads of cool stuff.

[Eth]

For now I would suggest using the DOS or Windows version of COB2POF for the initial conversion.  There are still several bugs with PCS.

As a side note, if you get an empty POF with PCS, then the problem is with the structure of the objects in the COB.  In the current version I found there must be at least one local light attached to the main group as a sibling.  There also has to be a hierarchy (a group composed of at least 2 siblings, one of the siblings can be a local light and as noted before, there has to be a local light at the root level of the hierarchy).

[Jabu]

Yeah, Kazan said that it won't convert ungrouped objects.

And it's not a bug either, it's a feature  

[Setekh]

A 'feature'...  

[Eth]

Actually the issue of not converting things if they aren't grouped wasn't what I was referring to as a bug.

Kazan has actually done a very good job with PCS, I especially like the ability to import the extended data chunks (guns, paths, etc.) from another POF so you don't have to retype all that in after making a minor change to a model.  Now if he would just add importing the lights from the HDR2 chunk of an existing  POF it would be a great tool if for nothing else than the import features.

But, there are still a few problems with the model conversion