with high poly models without significant unwrapping baking is worthless, it makes millions of 1 px dots on the map because it appliees the map to each surface, a high poly model would be a bnightmare to unwrap, that's why they usually don't have any textures or only have procedural textures for things like grain, scratch, dirt

God bless you, kind sirs.

Evil...i play your warlords mod dedicated...frankly, this excites me....Finally, I can shove a corellian corvette down ANOTHER galaxys mouth .....Long live evillejedi!!!!

I had the same problem with the ship disapearing, then I changed the option for how many frames it exports in the pandaX settings and it started working

I think he meant export Top Frame Only

as soon as I can get the textures to export properly I think I will release the following ships

tie fighter
corellian gunship
Nebulon- B frigate
loronar strike cruiser
Victory I Destoyer
Imperator I Destroyer

they won't be in components, but they should have hardpoints for weaponry

I'm waiting for patch 1.1 before making any major changes, just fooling around right now

you can add dummies in 3DS Max and they work. I just dont know how to change ingame ship size and the orientation of the dummies.

http://www.new-avalon.de/GCmods/ShadowExample.JPG

http://www.new-avalon.de/GCmods/OmegaExample.JPG

p.s. the omega's hull section is rotating

well the dummies are just cubes in Max for me. I dont see into what direction they face (or at least I dont know where I see it). ^^

gonna try playing arround with the size some more (omega was 7 parsec long on a tiny hull). ^^

for the rotation I used 3DS Max and let Panda export it as animation (at 3DS Max Objects activate "include animations", at Animations hit "Add" and add an animation within the used frames (0 to whatever), Key Options stays "Matrix", Timeline uses "3DS Max Ticks", at X File Settings enable "include animation options"). that worked for me.

to create an animation in 3DS Max you can simply declare a time intervall (0 to 100 or so). then you can do stop&go motion capturing basically. For each frame in the time intervall you move/scale/rotate your objects in 3DS Max the way you want it to define the animation over the whole time intervall (like they did for the wallace and gromit movies ).

or go to the "Motion" tab and then choose "Parameters" then Transform Position/Rotation/Scale with TCB, then at PRS Parameter choose Rotation, then add key information for all keys you have defined (keys are special frames that define at which point in your time intervall the object should be exactly the way you want it. for instance I used at frame 0 that the hull section was horizontal. while doing all that of course have the parts of the modell selected that you want to rotate or be animated.

so it looked like this under key info for my simple rotation:
key: 1, time: 0, X: -1, Y: 0, Z: 0, Angle: 0, EaseTo: 0, EaseFrom: 0, Tension/Bias/Continuity: 25
and
key: 2, time: 240 (used 240 frames in total for the animation), X: 0 Y: -1,Z: 0, Angle: 180 (half way for 1 full rotation, but as it is beeing repeated it looks like a 360 degrees rotation anyway), EaseTo: 0, EaseFrom: 0, Tension/Bias/Continuity: 25

you can probably use the curve editor too, but Iam not a 3DS Max pro anyway so I cant explain it more in detail.


I have one more problem however. The X-Files are extremely large (Omega is over 20 Megabyte, my Sharlin Cruiser is 18 Megs big). I cant really reduce the number of polygons without destroying the model and I already removed everything unnecessary. is there any way to make the X Files smaller (does GC2 accept binary comprimated X-Files instead of text?)

link not working for me

btw GC2 accepts comprimated binary X-Files. that reduced the size from 18,7 MB from my Sharlin Cruiser down to 5 MB. Which is still pretty big but way better than 18 MB for download purpose. didnt see a difference to a text X-File ingame.

link works now thanks.

Iam still looking for lower poly models to use so I dont have to make them myself (not enough time on my hands), but it seems most sites that had babylon 5 models for modding purpose are closed down now.

found a site that has lots of Babylon 5 models for Blender ( http://www.b5-blender.com ) , but 3DS Max doesnt accept 3ds Files exported via Blender for me at least.

Iam still looking for lower quality models to use. wanted to use the one from the Babylon 5 mod of Star Trek Armada2, which are well done, but not that excessive in terms of polys, but I couldnt find a tool, programm or plugin to get the .sod format imported into Max or Blender etc. or converted into anything I can use. ;(

Iam now looking if I can use Lightwave Models of Buda 5 v1.0 (Babylon 5 TC of I-War 1) (importing them into Blender, converting them into obj or dxf and then importing them into 3ds Max, sigh).

anyway, I uploaded a Minbari Nial Fighter (X-File with dummies and textures) as first example to the metaverse library. Its waiting for approval by Stardock now. you all can have a look at it when its approved. ^^

yeah, but the demo version doesnt allow to save your converted models and 50 $ just for a conversion is not my idea of a good deal.