Fritz,

Ideally - a ship should be a continuous unbroken surface with all faces facing outwards and no reversed polys visible, as freelancer will 'see though' that surface, now you can have 'holes' provided they have external textured inner faces. Cockpits that display the pilot model should also be 'lined'... as once a texture is made transparent, the faces below are visible. For low poly models it is better to extrude faces from ma simple primative and develop from there as this minimizes the vertex's and gives a better look in game. Sometimes this is very difficult to achieve with fittings and weapon mounts etc.. Freelancer will display these quite well as it is not picky in that respect.. but if so all internal unseen faces should be removed, to keep polycounts down, and no untextured faces should be visible.

Harrier



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

Also, I should butt in and note that if you have a model with facets that are turned inside-out in a contiguous mesh, then you're likely to run into problems at export time- the CMP exporter is extremely prone to crash if it encounters polys that aren't valid for any reason, and flipped verts can sometimes point to areas where a mesh is corrupted

Right, so putting ... erm .. for example, to make a flying saucer I couldn't make a disc then put a half a sphere in there and poke out however much of the top i wanted to show. that's quite out.

I assume I can add several primitives to a model as long as i weld the vertices and make sure the normals are all pointing the same way right?

No, wait!

Yes, you can "poke" things through one another. That's just fine- except for the huge numbers of polygons that players will never see... that will get rendered every update. Try to do that... ah... only where it really adds to the greebles, but doesn't unnecessarily add to the polycount. For example, take a cube, remove one plane, and then "bury" the sides into the rest of the model, so that none of the open edges can be seen. That's a great way to add little bumps and things, and it only uses up 10 tris. It's a perfectly-valid way to model for FL- the engine does not care whether tris are contiguous meshes, when it comes to CMPS.

What I was nattering on about was the fact that when you see reversed tris (black areas) on a model in Milkshape (other than a whole part which has been flipped, usually due to using a mirror operation, which is OK and normal) it often means that the model's damaged. That's all. Feel free to bury things in each other- I do that all the time