Lancersreactor

YOU are fuggin awesome, my friend. ALL props to you.....saved me tons of time and frustration. THANKS BRO~ Hoffa

Is it Dt_name??? If it is I must apologize... Is there anywhere I can verify that? God, I was so burned out at that point... lol And no prob Hoffa... Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/2/2004 6:48:03 PM

Hi first thx@drizzt4.0 for the tuturial but if have a proble the link for the cmp exporte plug-in for ms3d is down! can somebody say me where i can get it? sorry my it was my failor if found it Edited by - andy_g on 2/3/2004 7:13:17 AM

First thanks your hard work to me. But your "Dc_name" let me spend my time 3 days and do many test to got a white ship. Very thanks pSYCHO let me out the nightmare. However thanks for your work again, I hope you can finsh those error.

NP i´ll get right on it... when i wrote this tutorial i had the acrobat demo... but now that i reinstalled windows i should be able to use it again... (hopefully) unless someone knows a program that can do acrobat type stuff for free? Till then I´m trying to fix that Dt_name mistype... as far as the not working downloads... these links i used are direct connections the websites that host them... Lancerplanet is going through a major overhaul at the moment... so anything i linked to that was hosted by them will not be available from the tutorial until they are done with the upgrade. also if they change the link at all... ill end up creating a v1.4 of my tutorial to fix the broken links... <img src=smilies/icon_smile_disapprove.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> sorry for the inconvenience. Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/10/2004 9:56:29 PM

Im lost (obivously) in your tutorial at the part where your creating the cocpit and you say to bevel/extrude by 5 and outline by -3 it keeps coming out with a triangle jetting out at the tip OH NOOOOOOOOOO IM LOST, AAGGGGGGGGAAAAAAIIIIINNNNNN .....

you shouldn´t go by the numbers, as your modell might use other dimensions. try pressing the &lt;&gt; buttons and go to a value where the cockpit looks good.

yes... i agree... while i put some dimensions into the tutorial... the best way to go is by feel. i only put in the demensions to give people an idea of what may work. um, got a triangle? best chance is to start at an outline of about 1 and raise it from there. the pyramid that is your cockpit should slowly become more defined. Once again its all in what you are looking for. My original jet style ship (the first picture in the tutorial) took me hours on hours to create. but then again it was the first ship i had ever made using 3dsmax. in the tutorial you should be using Gmax which while it is a very powerful modeling program, isnt as sofisticated as 3dsmax so the ship wont look as nice. <A href=´http://sky.prohosting.com/drizzt4u/ships/´ Target=_Blank> you can check out some of my ships in my ship gallery. </a> (off topic!) anywhoo... starting at 1 for the bevel should help you out alot.

I followed the tutorial nice work btw and thanks for the effort you put forth to make, the problem I am having is this, my ship is invisible, textures don´t seem to work any gues out there as to why?

thats probably due to the Dc_name typo i fixed in version 1.3 try using Dt_name when working on the MAT file, also make sure that your textures are flipped horizontally before importing them to the mat file. also, there is one thing i cant seem to figure out myself just yet... some of my ships while docking will be invisible then as they get closer to the POV or camera they all of a sudden appear... ive been told that this is because of the LOD settings. However the level of detail is something I´ve yet been able to figure out... if you scalled your ship to a really big size you may be coming accross this problem. and im talking like planet size... lol oh, on a side note dont forget to try increasing the ships scale... if you try mounting weapons and see just a ball of em then your scalling is too small. but if you see the weapons where they should be and dont see a ship thats another matter entirely... thats what i get sometimes and i really think thats a LOD problem. new info that might be added to the tutorial. LOD ranges are kinda like how far a way a ship can be and still be seen by the camera. and it seems that the numbers are meters: so like 9999 would be 9.9K. thanks muches to chips for explaining this in <A href=´http://www.lancersreactor.org/t/forum/topic.asp?topic_id=28435&amp;forum_id=29&amp;Topic_Title=Invisible+ship+HELLLLLLLP&amp;forum_title=Freelancer+Editing+Tutorial+Forum&amp;cat_title=Freelancer+Editing&amp;M=False´ Target=_Blank>this thread started by LAG</a> Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/16/2004 9:11:24 AM Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/16/2004 9:12:07 AM Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/16/2004 9:26:07 AM

SIDENOTE: A wrong mat declarations, such as typos, or missing material will cause a non textured ship... all you will see is white non-textured ship. Invisible ships from docking or at cityscape has LOD problems. There is also sometimes a hole on a ship, this is caused by reversed triangles. you will see this in ms3d as black face when the texturing is off. This is caused by importing from a different modeller which is already mirrored. and also that Hp/FIxed/HpMount is always present when you export your model to FL. or else your ship will sink when parked. <img src=smilies/icon_smile_big.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> <font size=1 face="trebuchet ms"><BLOCKQUOTE><hr size=1 noshade>----------------<A href=´http://www.lancersreactor.org´ Target=_Blank> E&#183;N&#183;D O&#183;F M&#183;E&#183;S&#183;S&#183;A&#183;G&#183;E ... </a>---------------- <hr size=1 noshade></BLOCKQUOTE></font><font face=´trebuchet ms, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica´ size=2>

Hey all, Just curious has anyone made a tutorial like this for making custom ship weapons(like turrets) from scratch in milkshape and then finishing them? If so where could I find it? Thanks.

Three things: GOOD TUTORIAL!!!! #1 How do I do the hardpoints? I´m sorry, but it makes no sense to me.... #2 How do I do the textures? #3 Can you make a system creation tutorial? Thanks! -~Saber~-

um... with hardpoints the best thing to remember is that its just a single face or polygon... a triangle thats all... the only thing that makes em special is the name. try helping me to help you by telling me what you arent getting... like maybe a reference to a subtitle in the tutorial or something like that... are you not understanding the differences in the hardpoints, why in the world i copied faces to make them, or am i just completely baffeling you and i need to bash my head into the wall about 50 times to wake up my dead braincells again to rework that section? im glad you like the tutorial but if you have a question i really need to know the WHOLE problem... (caps for emphasis only) i also understand that the tutorial is LONG... and sometimes reading through the whole thing at once is a bit much. set it down for a bit and try reading the texture area again. textures arent that hard... all you really need to make sure of is that the texture files are TGA files. also... if you are trying to make your own texture map where the ship would be REALLY detailed i cant help you. I only use tile type maps because i SUCK at texturing and since this was a nOOb´s tutorial, i thought thats all i really needed to explain. um, and no im not going to be doing a system tutorial because i have absolutely no idea how to make one. And im not going to write another tutorial until i know for certain i did this one right. Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/18/2004 8:34:14 AM

thank you for the excellent tutorial. i´m just reading through it now, and i find it to be very well written, and hopefully i´l have something useful to show from it soon.

I´ve got LOD ranges covered in version 1.4. All you guys have helped me out so much with the questions and all the other tutorials and forums on here. I couldn´t have ever writen this tutorial without TLR.

Your participation here is thanks enough. <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>

ok, going through the tutorial and downloading the tools that you recommend, however, the links for the ms3d exporter plugin and the gmax .m3d exporter are broken, and i can´t quite seem to find good links to those files. can you direct me to where i´m going? thanks, --Lowell