Shuttle 3D Size?

  • Hay guys im working on my first ship import which will be a Federation Shuttle and I wanted some advice on what size I should export it out of milkshape?


    The tutorial I have says increase the size of thier ship to 50 but as mine is only a shuttle and it should be small enough to land on the Federation Star Ships I thought it would be a gud Idea to ask for some advice before guessing at what size to make it?


    Oh and I dont want lasers to look massive on the shuttle so is it possible to remove the visual of the Laser or will I have to make the shuttle alot bigger than the laser to hide the weapons?

  • Ok...


    Export scale settings for the cmp exporter...


    All depends on how big the model is and how big you want it, so, first thing is to understand what FL's scaling system is, 1 unit = 1 meter. Then you have to decide how you're going to handle the fact that most trek ships are small capitals not dinky little single seaters like FL player ships.


    The ds9 style runabout shuttles are about the same size as say, a liberty rhino, so your enterprises and voyagers etc will be big damm ships that can only 'moor' at starbaes...


    If you shrink the large ships down, then, the shuttles will be about the size of a jettisoned cargo can...


    Scaling is a bitch...


    What scale is your shuttle mesh made to? If it's 1 unit = 1 meter, set cmp export scale to 1, and it will be shuttle sized in the game, if the models original scale is different, you have to change the export scale.


    Remember, the cmp exporters default scale down of 92 was determined by "loading an anubis and squinting at it next to the plugin coders new ship" so it's a bit vague.


    Best way to make sure something loads in FL the size you want it to, is 1 make mesh at 1 unit = 1 meter, export at scale = 1. If you need to shrink a series of ships down, make em at a reduced size "Ok, a thingy class ship should be 157m but I'll only make it half that size" then just export scale 1.



    As for the guns... standard thing for a gun you dont want to see, be it a federation phaser, or a liberty cruiser gun, is a dummy gun mesh, thats just a small triangle. I've seen trek ships in FL use hardpoints set just inside the hull, with these dummy weapon meshes, so, no massive FL gun meshes on your mini voyager, just beams exiting the hull near where they are supposed to as per the tv show.


    So... first things first, make a ship... Get it flying... THEN we learn how to code up custom weapon entries... ;)

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • Yep, once you have decided your common scale.


    If you use a scale smaller than the 1u=1m, remember that when you visit the dealers on stations, your ship may look out of scale compared to dear old trent and the dealer npc, unless you edit your 'bar scripts' to leave the figures out.


    And adding the new weapons with the 'no gun mesh' option isn't too bad, you would have had to edit the weapons anyway for a trek TC mod...


    The ship meshes you're using, make em yourself, or are you using downloadables from a site, and are they all made to a common scale?

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • On the subject of Trek models...


    Just happened to run across some links while checking an old aquaintance's DeviantArt page, that might interest you if you havn't seen them already...


    http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=146409


    http://www.trekmeshes.ch/


    http://www.madshipyard.com/downloads.htm


    Be warned, some of these might be a bit higher in the old polygon count that you want, but, if you havn't seen them before, there might be something you can use...

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • didnt have the madshipyard so thanx for that, did have the others though and yep my models are off the net and come with textures. Iv got to add a few easy textures that the modeler did with their 3D software such as cockpit which is just a black mat but other than that its should work pritty well. the shuttle is my first because its only 55k polys and not many textures to work with. some of my ships have around 20 - 30 textures so im looking at a day each lol. also the shuttle will work well as a starter ship for me to test a few weapons. Iv even had an idea for an admin race, its called the caretaker, although there have not been any ships posted for this race i recon I can make sum up. The possibliltys seem to be endless with star trek so im glad i decided to work on this. just hope freelancer can handle how much iv gota change lol

  • Speaking of stuff that needs changing...


    Info cards etc.


    http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/USS_Voyager


    If you havn't got this link already, they have plenty of stuff for info cards etc... Or even just the 'official sizes' of the ships, to help with resizing the meshes relative to each other (especially if they come from different modelers on different dl sites.

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • yeah I have, I also have a few other sites. one of my favs: Planetside - Star Trek - Ships of the Fleet has the In Service and Out of Service Dates too which helps alot when deciding which ships to use. dont want the main game having any clashes with my intro storyline lol. It only takes one trekkie to bring my game down with one comment and although im not doing this for others later on in the future I may want to start up and host my own server so if I get it right now it means less work later.


    in theory would it be possible to recreate the characters with my own. When I get to a point where im just updating the game I might want to bring my own 3d characters in to make it look nicer and if so will it create problems with animation parts, e.g. where trent works into the bar?

  • Hmm, editing characters...


    I havn't seen anything about bringing in new char meshes (as opposed to reskinning existing ones) except for one rather vague reference to a new mesh in a readme (saying that the new mesh wasn't in the mod or available at all), so I can't help you with that. It might be possible is the best I can say, maybe Swat or somebody knows better.


    At first you're probably better off just reskinning existing char meshes.


    However, it's gonna be worth looking into 'bar scripts' etc, thn files and all that at some point, if only to edit them so the chars dont appear in the ship dealer and equip room screens along side your ship meshes, if you use a non standard scaling, doesn't look right to have trent using voyager as a seat... lol


    Heh, back to messing with those 'voyager' meshes I grabbed... ;D

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • well i already have access to a 3d cargo bay which im going to use unsted of the freelancer ship dealer 1 not sure what to use for upgrades though.


    Will post a new thread about 3d character meshes to see if anyone else knows. if your not up to much ur welcome to help me with this project, its not easy on ya own lol??

  • Ok, been tinkering with that shuttle mesh...


    Initial thoughts... "What a freaking mess..." Some sloppy mesh making here, and a lazy attitude to fixing bits when the mistakes were noticed, at some point it might be worth making a cleaner mesh, reusing some parts of this one, but thats for version 2...


    I've sorted out the various bits into port and starboard nacells, port and starboard wings and hull, to make it easier to produce a decent sur later and the option to have destructable parts at some point, and started rationalising the materials, eg taking the 20 bits that are generic hull white, and grouping them together and assigning one plain white tex instead of 5 or 6 plain white tex, fixing reversed normals, etc.


    There are a few kludgy bits I'm gonna leave for now as fixing them would involve rebuilding those bits from scratch, and they are not critical, chopped a shed load of polys out of the warp coils because there were way way too many, and 45% of em were INSIDE the nacells where they cant be seen anyway. I'm gonna have to rework some of the texture maps, as they come with bump maps for panel lines and FL doesnt support that yet, soooo, merge parts of the bump maps with the diffuse maps for a better finish.


    What with the demands of 'real life (tm)' it might take me a few days to get it all done to the point where I can export a cmp and do a minimum flyable hardpointing and ship script...

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

  • Bloody hell, well thanx anyways glad you offered to look at it. Theres no rush in getting it done. I finish my exam 2morra and so will start work on the rest of the heads this week. I also still need to perfect trents head to make it less trent lol.


    What do you recon I should do about the music? should I use orig star trek stuff like bridge commander and all the film soundtracks or should i create them myself as I can play and have prity good software?


    oh and hows ur after effects ability?

  • If you've got the ability like you say, it will always be best to use original stuff.
    Do something inspired by ST, even maybe take parts of scores from the original music. :P


    Copyright issues aside, it gives the mod a little something extra, even if it is commonplace to turn music off after a while.

  • yeah I like to perfect stuff though so it may take me awhile to produce each peace. Might leave them as they are for now maybe add this to version 2. As for copyright I dont think they will care about me atm. My mod isnt close to being finished and im not running a server with it for a while yet so they have no need to worrie about me lol. When I do run it, as it is free unless I start to take people from ST Online the most they can do to a poor person like me lol is demand I shut it down cus trust me it would cost them more to take me to court than I can afford to give them.

  • That's very true, getting your priorities straight is very important for such an ambitious task. :P
    If you haven't got a well thought out and documented to-do list I definitely encourage you to write one, it'd make the job much more organised.


    All I can suggest on the matter is perhaps to just work on the music when you're feeling bored out of your brain on modding. xD
    Basically what I'm doing for FL10K, which probably explains why I haven't done any of the music yet xD

  • its finding the time atm.Im not as young and free as I used to be lol. Thats why iv given myself 2 years to get v1 done and then move onto updating it ready for v2.


    As for the music, yeah ill prob create a peace here and there when I fancy havin a play around


    Talking of music, which sound track is the main menu track? is it easy to access or is it compressed into a file?

  • If I remember correctly from my work on the ESM, the main menu pulls the omicron and omega _space files for use. At least, that's all I ever heard.
    Look for Audio/Music/music_***_space.wav
    It may use the other files, but I can't give that guarantee.


    Check the archives for a post on how Audio should be recorded or rendered for it to work in FL, i'd grab the link for you but I'm in a tad of a hurry. :P


    Good luck!

  • Ok, re the shuttle mesh...


    I've trimmed polys, regrouped material zones, etc., and tried the first cmp export today...


    Hull 16.3 k polys, Nacells about 9.3k polys each, Wings, about 2.5 k polys each...


    Exporting just the hull works fine, but any attempt to export the nacells and or wings, crashes hardcmp, it just does not like the mesh.


    I have this horrible feeling I'm gonna have to rebuild most of the mesh, or even make a new ship from scratch, there is something seriously nasty in this mesh, unless it's just 'too many polys' for the 0.27 cmp exporter to handle.


    Alternatives...
    1. New mesh from scratch
    2. Partial rebuild
    3. Use a different mesh (there is a type-9 in the 'federation ship pack' here in the tlr dl database, much lower poly count)
    4. Use a different mesh and upgrade the detail.


    Any thoughts?


    EDIT: Hull wireframe in hardcmp...

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...