I wonder if polycount has anything to do with it?

Lemme guess. You're using Gmax. But let's cover the basics first:

1. Every part of the model has to have a UNIQUE NAME.

2. Every Material used must have a UNIQUE NAME.

3. Every part MUST HAVE A MATERIAL.

If it's one of those 3 things... fix it, and your problem will disappear. I'm guessing, though, that you've read Drizt's tutorial, so you aren't doing anything wrong on those steps.

If I'm right... then what's going on is that Gmax's welding operations have produced corrupted model geometry.

First, run the Model Cleaner. It's under Tools. That might solve your problem, but probably not.

If that doesn't work:

Unweld all parts in Gmax... make darn sure that all verts are sticking outwards... import into MS3D... and then weld each part manually in MS3D. If any blackened areas show up on the model, or if looks "kinda funny" in MS3D... the model is hosed, and you may or may not be able to fix it.

I've had several bad experiences with Gmax's Q3 format export, and had to use a professional's tool (Rhino3D, with the polygon Bonus Tools installed) to Unify all the mesh vertexes and unweld them... and then I imported the parts into MS3D, welded everything again, and voila... working geometry.

Basically, if the CMP Exporter fails... it's not that it's bad software. It's that your model has problems. Sorry to deliver such bad news- you may or may not have access to the kinds of tools you're going to need to use to fix the issues... but you can probably do this with Gmax's own tools, if you take it easy and work with the software.

And unless your polycount is really super-ridiculous... like... over 20K... it's not the polycount.

Edited by - Argh on 11/26/2004 11:56:40 PM

I'm not using GMAX. I'm using 3DS max, i exported to 3ds, imported, and then did the tutorial.

I found the tutorial AFTER i had made the model. :p

Gmax and 3DS use the same algorithms for welding ops, but I'm a little surprised that native 3DS content is giving you this problem- I've exported 3DS files from Rhino, and I've not had any problems.

That's not to say that I haven't had a few problems even with model exports from Rhino- I've had a few models that were just junk, and I had to throw them out, which sucks, but it's just part of doing business- now I make sure that my OBJ files (I usually export via OBJ so that I can use UVMapper to create the skins) are valid for export through the CMP exporter before I even bother painting up a skin- I just name the model and a Material, assign the Material to the whole model, and I'm done.

If I have serious problems with a model, I've learned several tricks... these things aren't applicable to polygonal models, but only to NURBS models:

1. If the model won't mesh right as one piece, split it in half. Then mesh the half and mirror it. I've found this fixes corrupted mesh problems 90% of the time.

2. Play with your mesh settings. Sometimes you can generate a valid mesh by moving the dials around, where before you were producing junk.

3. Sometimes... you just have to rebuild whatever part is causing the problem.

4. Sometimes... you need to rethink an area with complex curvature.

5. Avoid creating kinks or severe angles whenever possible- these things can cause geometry that's just fine for renders, but won't export to CMP.

So if you've labeled everything correctly, and you're still having problems... it's almost certainly an issue with the geometry. At least with 3DS, you have a full set of tools to unweld your model and check all of the polys out... good luck

Edited by - Argh on 11/27/2004 12:49:19 AM

I'm not following with the whole unweld part.

What exactly do you mean?

To make curved objects look curved, even when the geometry is very low-poly, modern 3D engines (esp. game engines, like FL's) use a trick called "welding".

What welding does, essentially, is provide the engine with different ways to interpret the angle of two polygon edges. This means that a surface of a sphere made with only a few hundred polygons can look almost as nice as one that has several thousand. When polygons are welded, their vertices are joined to one another- in an unwelded model, each polygon is actually a seperate object, although it retains its grouping information, if the model format supports it.

Here is an example of a sphere, before and after welding:




Welding and Unwelding are modeling operations that you perform on polygonal surfaces. Unwelding removes the welding information- the polygons will now be very sharply visible, and it will be obvious that your model is low-poly.

The problem is very simple: welding often creates problems, because when whatever modeling software you're using performs welding operations, it tries to "sort" the model's verts to get the closest match between every neighboring polygon. In the case of kinks or areas of severe curvature... this can result in polygons that are "flipped"... or facing "inwards". Exporting such models from the CMP Exporter will cause a crash in MS3D. For that matter, MS3D will crash when dealing with these sorts of objects while trying to do a lot of other operations, such as flipping verts that you've accidently exported with the "wrong side out". So you'll need to go back into 3DS and fix these problems... and re-export.

Okay, I've got the mesh CMP Exported, and I'm trying to put it igame. No textures yet, because I want to see if I did this right.

You won't see it in the game until you've put textures on it and either made a MAT or exported the textures into the CMP via the MAT exporter... for the first time out... just use TGA textures... when you get a little more comfortable with things, use DDS whenever possible- this requires manually editing the CMP with UTF Edit, but it's the best way to make your ship perform well in the game engine.

So don't be surprised when your new ship's invisible

At any rate, if you can export it via CMP Export and view it in HardCMP (my tool of choice for checking models out, as it's a lot faster than firing the game up)... then you're a lot closer to "done"

But... before it'll work really nicely... there are two things you'll need to do, besides using HardCMP to add the hardpoints for weapons, etc...

1. You need to get a SUR file that closely matches the model's geometry.

2. You'll need to use FLModel Tool to resize the SUR and CMP... don't be surprised if the model you exported looks extremely tiny, even after you've textured it properly. I don't know what modeling scale you're working in... but when I export things from MS3D... I usually have to use FLModel Tool to scale everything by 45X or so. Also, use FLModel Tool to scale/move the SUR file you've selected... this will make your model work very nicely, assuming that you've picked a SUR that's a close fit.

BTW, HardCMP will view SUR files for ships, besides allowing you to add/alter hardpoints with ease, compare your ship to others in the game (to get clues about turret setup, scale, etc., etc., etc.)... it's a super-vital tool, so go get it now if you don't already have it.

Edited by - Argh on 11/27/2004 2:08:50 AM

Will be moving this thread to the modelling forum shortly Great stuff Argh, fantastic contributions

NP, just let him get that last bit read first

I should write a tut. about this whole "corrupt geometry" problem... I've seen at least 4 posts about MS3D crashes in the last few days... it's very cool to see that we're attracting lots of new modelers (maybe I can finally get some help for my mod, who knows? ) but if they all get frustrated and leave because they can't figure out why the model they spent 12 hours making doesn't work worth a gosh-darn... they'll just leave. I almost tore my hair out, the first time it happened... it was my first "ship" model (the ocean-going kind, for those of you who haven't played my mod), and it was a disaster... but after doing some experiments, I finally figured out that it was a geometry problem... and I've seen it happen over and over again, in various ways, so it's not just happening to me.

Anyhow, good to hear that you're almost there, Koopa... keep at it, man, you'll get it

Argh,

as far as scale is concerned there is a simpler solution.. import the pilot and seat, build your ship around it... When satisfied with the scale (pilot to ship) scale by 100, export and it's all cool ....instant right scale

Harrier


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

Thanks so much Argh, for having patience with me. It's my first time

anyway, I just read the part about the MAT file,a dn the textures and i think ill have a basic grey for now. Since i used UVWUnwrap in MAX, things would work alot differently now that I have different texture coords for the model and all =
anywho, thanks alot guys! appreciate the help

I've run into a problem.

when i zip up the file into a zip.flmm, and double click it, it opens FLMM, but does nothing.

I tried manually putting the foldr into the mdos folder, and when i opened the FLMM, i got:

Parsing error on line 5: unable to find '=' (in 'C:\Program Files\Freelancer Mod Manager\mods\bansheemod\script.xml')
Parsing mod script...

I have no idea what that means.

I figured out how tog et it to extract..duh, i needed to change the flmm to flmod. :p

but the parsing error keeps coming up, and I don't know why. I'm no expert on XML or scripts, so it would be greatly appreciated if somone could help?