As i have noticed that the slipstream has no Glass texture. I started fiddling the .mat file using the utf editor. i looked at the several mat files of the original ships and found the glass entries.

Then, i copied the entries of the Dagger's Glass Material. I was amazed of the result. I have now, a glass which i can see my... Where the heck is the Pilot?!?!?!

Wanderer has forgotten to include the pilot's hardpoint... no, he intended not to put the hardpoint 'cuz he could not create a glass material through his tga file.

I created the HpPilot entry using the almighty UTF editor, and placed it at 0,0 location. run fl again... still has no pilot, where is that s****d pilot, i said to myself. exited fl, and edited the cmp file. relocated it at position 0, 3, 0... run fl again, flew into space, alas i see him, the pilot floating in SPACE??? doing the trial and error thingy to correctly placed my pilot. ALAS, i have created my new mat file upgrade....

I flew the slipstream for a while. Docked here, docked there, until i found a glitch with the glass texture... it seems to disappear while docked at a Hessian Base. Must be a lighting problem. as the light passes thru it and it blends well with the light as if it disappears. so finally the transparent texture for custom ships are born...

As i worked at my office, i got an idea for my next ship, the ghost...

to be continued....

---

a message from firebase...

---

i started planning it in paper. If you know Voltes V anime from the 80's i think, i was a child then... the ghost is somewhat fashioned like the panzer 3.

now i have my 3dsmax fully working and my knowledge of model creation has expanded somehow, thanks to the tutorial of low poly modeling... I started fiddling with it....

First i created a box. then i do a lot of bevel and extrudes. and move vertex here and there. Separated the Canopy from the body using the detach poly. now the cockpit is empty... it has a hole that you can see the other parts of your ship...

i created a rectangular shape and attached it to the nose where my cockpit is located. then i bevel and extrude it to form a cockpit. Showed it to Glock and Wanderer, and they liked it. now for the texture. I don't know anything about textures. i don't know how to place them... i lokked at the tutorial for the material texturing of a low poly ship in 3dsmax. So i figured out how to use the texture editor (UV Mapping).... i don't have any texture tile and i don't know how to make one....

i openned up milkshape withe cmpimporter loaded. I loaded several ships and exported their tga files, not dds from utf editor... i looked at them one by one and used them as a material skin for the ghost. I found one skin that will look okay. the skin that is used by BH fighters... so i UV mapped it and created a good texture for the ship. showed it up on lancers and victor noticed the i used texture from fl and he said you might appreciate it more if you have created your own skin... an i don't know about how to create skin... well that's about that. time to convert it again... I asked Wanderer to help me export it again. I gave him the ms3d conversion. And he did export it. He game me the cmp, sur and the preliminary mat file.

now i have given the slipstream a glass canopy and so this ghost too must have one. Copied the codes for the glass material, but this time i have experimented those floating point entries, Dc, and Oc. It was then that i found out that it is actually the diffuse color and the opacity that i was fiddling with. And luckily i have gave the ghost a unique the spawn face looking cannopy. and i have made it black. tested with different variations tho.

As this discovery i have made, the slipstream comes next and make it the glass to be black too.

The problem them that i cannot convert my own models into fl is that milkshape won't run in my office PC, Pentium II 233Mhz with 128 Meg of ram and i was using a 16MB TNT card.

When i finally got a copy of milkshape 3d in my home PC, P3 500Mhz, 128MB RAM with GeForce 2 MX 400... it run quite normally.

to be continued....

---

a message from firebase...

---