Some of the tutorials can get a bit confusing, just went through that myself. First off, you can skip the whole Lightwave bit, if you've made the model in Milkshape you can do everything from there.

Exporting the model:
- Make sure you have the first group, regardless of what it is, named something unique, I use a personal tag followed by the shipname, like "vic_shuttle" This is important because the exporter will use this as the 3db name and it must be unique in freelancer, so I heard... never tested it thouhg, better safe than sorry.

- Make sure you have the hardpoints setup. It's really easy once you have done it but a bit frightening the first time You need at least Hp/Fixed/HpMount, the rest are all actually optional. Each hardpoint object needs to be in it's own group and the group needs to have the name hardpoint name in it. Hardpoint groups also need to have NO material assigned to them. Your best bet here is to go to giskard's website, download one of his ship models and look at how he did it.

- You will need to scale it up to some incredibly huge size, this will take practice but you can probably start by scaling it up 15-20x and fine tuning it from there.

- Export the model and save it under the same name as the first group, using my previous example I would save it as vic_shuttle.cmp

Now, go back to the tutorial on importing ships from lightwave and skip down to the part where he explains creating the mat files. Follow all of those steps and you'll save it with the same name you used above with ".mat" as the extension, for me this would be vic_shuttle.mat

Create a new ship archetype in shiparch.ini, create a new ship hull and package in goods.ini and fire up the game. If your ship is invisible but you can see the hardpoints your .mat file is wrong, you need to make sure that material library names match the material names you used in Milkshape. If you can see the ship model but the surfaces are all white you forgot to import the texture files into the .mat file or the files you imported were not supported (wrong type, bad dimensions, compressed, etc). If you can see your ship in space, but not while on a base your model may be upside down or the HpMount is placed above the ship, HpMount needs to be below the model with some space between it and the lowest point of the model.

That should be enough to get you started, just don't give up and if it doesnt work go back and check everything, I have a stupid little typo in my first mat file that drove me crazy for 3 hours until I found it and then suddenly everything worked. Doing that using only the tutorials available and a lot of trial and error is very rewarding, much more so that someone else doing it for you

ok...thanks a lot...i THINK i'm on the right track. I just need to know a few more things.
1. Does there need to be any hardpoints on the model for lights, tractor, docking, etc. on the model itself or are those just defined in the associated files?
2. Does the skin have to be one big TGA file (because right now it's a bunch of small jpg textures?
3. What are ALL of the filenames that are associated with a ship? (MAT, CMP, etc.) ...and what's in these files?

I really appriciate the help!

You can add the hardpoints for the lights (Hp/Fixed/HpRunningLight01 or Hp/Fixed/HpDockingLight01 or Hp/Fixed/HpHeadlight01) you can get away with just using one type, for example a bunch of running lights, and then mounting the appropriate light there in the goods.ini file. If you're going to have a tractor on the ship you'll need Hp/Fixed/HpTractor_Source, allthough for this one also you could simply define the tractor source in shiparch.ini to any valid hardpoint.

In milkshape each group can only use one texture file, so if your entire ship is in one group you have to use a single texture. If you have multiple groups you can use multiple textures.

Each ship need three main files... shipname.cmp, shipname.mat and shipname.sur. The sure file can just be copied from one of the existing ships that is about the right size and shape and renamed. You will also need to either use an existing cockpit ini or create a new one (e.g. Data/cockpits/liberty/shipnam.ini).

Hope that helps.

1. Like Victor says the rest of the hardpoints are optional. You can add them manually to your ships .cmp file later on but as this is a major hassle you are better adding them in milkshape and letting the exporter sort them out.

2. Your final texture must be in .tga format (actually .dds will work too but .tga is the easiest way to do it). It is possible to have multiple .tgas (each defined by a separate material) but this requires alot of extra hassle. Also there are various rules for the dimensions of the .tga. There seems to be a bit of debate on the exact rules for this, and they seem to vary depending on which graphics card you use, to be on the safe side stick to 128x128, 256x256 or 512x512.

3. The .cmp contains all the information relating to where vertexes are in spce in your model, what vertexes form the triangles and what texture to use for each mesh. The .mat contains the actual .tga/.dds image for the texture. The .sur file determines how a ship takes damage from energy weapons.

I'm currently in the same boat as mfalk. we're both noobs trying to model ships for the same server. But alas, it seems my boat is a bit behind mfalks, and I'm trying to catch up...

I'm stuck at the hardpoints step. I can't get to Giskard's website, I only get an error message, and I've been looking at the Drathi example that's included with the .cmp exporter. Now most of the harpoints make sense to me, but others do not (maybe i'm just slow). The harpoint I don't understand in the Drathi example is the Hp/Fixed/HpContrail01 (heh, after looking at it some more, things made sens... except for the contrail. Damn my newbish ways!)

I'd like to have two streams of exhaust show up when the thruster is engaged. Now, (beeing a noob) I'm assuming that I can just put two thruster mounts on and be done with it. But (again, as a noob) I wonder if that will allow the pilot to have two thrusters mounted, and I think that just may mess some things up but I'm not sure... so I guess I'm asking: Is it possible to have two streams of exhaust coming from one thruster, and if so, was my thinking right or wrong?

and btw, this thread has been a major help thus far, and I'll be sure to reference it in the coming steps.

Edited by - Syn on 16-07-2003 04:40:54

The contrail Hp's give your ship the "smoke" trails at the wingtips, basically

You can have as many thruster hardpoints as you like, and as long as they are properly defined for the ship in shiparch.ini the player can mount thrusters in all of them. It's cool how it works, yes you go nearly twice as fast as you would with one thruster, but at the same time you burn through your "thruster energy" twice as fast, so it balances out. Anyway, back to the model, just make multiple hardpoints;

Hp/Fixed/HpThruster01
Hp/Fixed/HpThruster02
etc...

The same is true for CM launchers (HpCM01) and mine dispensers (HpMine01) put as many as you want on there

And, I have to disagree with Redeye about one thing... TGA textures are not easier, they have larger file sizes and if you don't flip it before you import it they won't look right in the game. DDS files have no such problems, in fact if you make your DDS texture at 1024 x 1024 (or anything else bigger than 256x256) and some poor player with an old VooDoo card tries to load your ship they'll be fine as they'll only get the 256x256 mip and nothing higher, if it were a TGA they'd see nothing but a plain white model.

For any idea on file sizes... with two 512x512 tga's my ship's mat file was 1.3mb, with two 512x512 DDS images it's about 840k and it supports mip maps.

Wow thanks! of course, now that I know what contrail mounts are, I'm using those instead of thruster mounts, and the thruster mount is near the engine, where it "should be".

So now I move on to skinning...

The tutorial part about .mat files seems straight forward enough, but I'm still left with a few questions:

1. Since you suggest DDS files, is there a tutorial about suing those instead of tga, or will it all end up the same in the end?

2. I don't have photoshop... I think this may be a problem, but what if I only wanted to use the skins from the Kusari ships... could I then forgo the photoshop process and just assign the different pre-existing (they are pre-existing as dds aren't they?) skins to the apropriate texture?

3. Is that tutorial making the entire ship one big skin? cause I currently have 3 groups that should have 3 seperate skins... I'm assuming I'll just add two more nodes under both texture and material library, and give them different names and skins... I am a noob, and I'm really just looking for a confirmation, before I go mess it all up anyway :p

Edited by - Syn on 16-07-2003 15:39:08

The process for importing DDS images is the same as TGA images except you don't need to flip your DDS images.

I don't have photoshop either, I use Paint Shp Pro, works fine and can use Nvidia's DDS plugin for Photoshop. It's a bit tougher to use the existing skins though, if you export a few from the mat files you'll see why. They are either using tiling textures or always map a pair of triangle polygons rather than complete objects. Either way it'll be difficult using them with Milkshape models since milkshape will only let you use one texture per group where most modeling programs let you use one texture per face (excluding overlays and shaders). You may be better of folowing the Milkshape tutorials on texture coordinate editing and using custom skins.

You can use multiple skins, I've done it with three ships so far and it works fine. Each group in Milkshape can only use one texture file, but multiple groups can share the same texture. So if you ship is divided into three parts (fore, mid, aft) you could have the fore and aft sharing texture1 and mid using texture2, works like a champ And yes, they require additional entires in the mat file.

If you're making large ship models I have pitty on your soul, texturing them is a royal pain, small ships are far easier

how do you use dds in milkshape? I havent found a plug-in yet and the basic programm do not support them.

Okay... so now I'm insanely confused...

I dl-ed the trial version of psp 8 and haven't touched it much, TBH...

This is waaaay too much info for me to handle at once (maybe I'm just slow). Here, let me quote you and say how I interpretided things...

"Either way it'll be difficult using them with Milkshape models since milkshape will only let you use one texture per group "

I have 3 groups... omfg... I need a forth... i'll go make that 4 groups in a sec, and they each only need 1 texture / skin /whatever word I need... I'm so confused... anyways... so can I just assign the coralting existing kusari fighter skin to each group?

This also makes me wonder how much of this can be done via Milkshape... can I just texture the groups with a nice .jpg image and be done with it... no .mat or anything?

so what's the difference between a texture and a skin? Where do the materials in Milkshape come into play?

With all those questions lingering in the air, I think I need a break... Excuse me while I have a nervous breakdown...

Err... ok, one thing at a time

You don't use dds images in milkshape, in fact I don't even edit dds images. It works like this, you open up your favorite graphics program and make your texture (or skin, same thing really), you're likely to be using layers which none of the aforementioned texture types support so you save one version in your programs native format, for Paint Shop Pro this is .psp files. Then you just save copies, I save it as a bmp file for milkshape and a dds file for freelancer. The texture coordinate map (also referred to as a UV map) and the material names are the only important things when exporting from Milkshape to Freelancer, the actual image filename is irrelevant.

Textures and skins are essentially the same thing. Usually a "texture" is an image designed to tile over 3d objects whereas a "skin" is designed specifically for a particular 3d model. It doesn't really matter though and many people, myself included, interchange the two names at will just to confuse new guys

The textures/skins used in the original Freelancer ships are not what you might expect to see, if you have not extracted a few of them do so now and you will quickly see why you probably won't be able to use them for your custom ship.

Follow the tutorials in Milkshape for the texture coordinate editor, start simple with a box, when you can do that try it again with a cylinder then again with a sphere. Make sure you can can get the texture map to work without distorting the textures or any other visible errors and do things like display different parts of the texture on different sides of the object. Once you have mastered that with these "simple" objects then you can move on to your ship and you'll have a better understanding of everything involved.

It's like driving a car, you don't take someone who's never driven before and give them the keys to a Formula One race car and throw them into a race. Start simple, get comfortable, experiment and develop your own style and methods.

Take a few minutes (hours or days) to search the internet for tutorials on textures and skinning, what works for one game/program is likely to work for another. Starting your search at Milkshape's home page is a very good idea since they will deal specifically with Milkshape and it's limitations.

A few helpful hints:

- Put the ship down and work with something simple first, model it, texture (skin) it and get it in the game.

- Don't worry about Freelancer until you have to, just make your model and make a texture/skin for it. When that is done then you can worry about Freelancer, until then the only important thing is Milkshape and what it can/can't do.

- If you're not sure if something will work, try it, what's the worst that can happen?

- Save your work often and save with different names at different stages, so when you do try something and it doesn't work you can step back a bit and try something else.

Ok... this makes a lot more sense now...

I allready have the model (I know I probably didn't use correct techniques, but it works for now) and all the skinning is done in Milkshpape with materials so you can see what it will look like with those textures on it, and the .map file is just the file that tells the engine what to display and isn't something I need to worry about... yet...

Okay, I think I can handle this now. I'll just concetrate on getting a picture that resembles the Kusari textures and read up on texture coordinate editing... Wow, now it sounds simple :p. allright, thanks. I think I'm set from here.

my model the Slipstream XJ-376


Working hard to earn... but too lazy to do something...

ok, i was able to follow the tutorials through most of the way. The major problem now is that when I make a mat file in the utf editor and save it I can't reopen it. The mat file retains it's size but it shows an empty tree when i open it up in the utf editor and when i load the ship in FL, the ship is not there but the engine and guns are. Any ideas?