WIP of TheUnknown - Reimagined Kessok Heavy Concept

[Nero]

It looks awesome.

[Kirk]

Animated maps?

[Lionus]

I certainly wish that it will have kick-ass phasers that will give romulans and klingons creeps..

[Shadowknight1]

512x512's are high res?

[deadthunder2_0]

size is a issue here, 512x512 might not be as high, but i believe that anything over 240x240(I think) is high res, and i don't want to bog down any computer

[Nebula]

512x512 IMO was considered normal res 6 years ago... high res is anything 1024 and above.

[X_TheUnknown_X]

It's been a while since my last post; there's been a lot to get done in the meantime. I've spent almost two days just turning squares into triangles on the mesh and getting them to align properly (NifSkope does a better job of it than Blender, but I can't realign any normals with it). Then there's been the usual problems of converting to NIF, but those are out of the way now - so I've begun the process of hardpointing.

Some other news as well; I've been looking over the stock station model and realised the thing's HUGE   , it is completely out of proportion when you realise the dock entrance is tiny compared to the rest of station. Replacing the stock model with mine could end up causing some problems (especially with SP where it spawns ships inside Starbase 12). So, I've decided to make my station a separate model - but I will probably edit the Starbase 12 set script to switch it with my station. Then I can add some ships inside the base without using up polys in my current model, everybody wins   ! (it will be an option install, of course).


Now, I feel it's time to answer a few questions:

Animated maps?

Yes, I've followed Cordanilus' tutorial and they should be working. It's just that the Model Propery Editor refuses to read and open the file, and if MPE won't read it - I'm not sure if BC will. But I'll keep trying. Now, I'm working on the un-animated model just in case the animations don't work.

I certainly wish that it will have kick-ass phasers that will give romulans and klingons creeps..

Weapons. Well, yes. However, it is a space dock and not a battlestation, so I think it will be fairly limited weaponry. Not to say that it can't defend itself, but I'd imagine there'd always be a ship to defend it (probably an Akula   )

512x512's are high res?

Well, maybe not high res - but normal res. The 512's are only being applied to a comparitively small area of the model, so larger textures would be being wasteful - 512's give the best resolution, on the smaller areas for the lowest file size.

[Nebula]

hey have you taken a look at that one TNG ep with the Binars??

[cordanilus]

Would you mind if I check it, because not all nif exporters are equal.  Sometimes, it doesn't export the nif heirarchy properly and I would have to check each piece to make sure it's configured properly.  Just hit me up on msnger, same as my email in my profile.  All I would need is the nif.

[tiqhud]

some program like cord- said mess up and dont export right, and without the nid\node hierarchy it is very hard to gett a Hp set up right. [down right imposible]

[X_TheUnknown_X]

Well, with Cordanilus' help, the animated maps are now working and Model Property Editor now open the file. So, yestersay was spent adding hardpoints, writing up descriptions and saving the plugin file. All seemed to be working, everyting was fine... until I started Quick Battle  .

It seems those annoying double-sided trianges have shown up again, uninvited. I now have a voxelizer debug file the size of a small novel  , confusingly I built the Akula and Kessok Destroyer in the same way at the Stabase and neither of those two had double-sided traingles. Besides, I'm not even sure what double-sided triangles actually are; the only idea I have are that they are duplicate vertices, but I need those to give the model hard edges (smoothing groups?).

It would be annoying is this meant a rebuild of the model, but as of now the game just won't load it. I'll keep trying until I run out of options. No screenshots this time, there's nothing to take a picture of  .

[KrrKs]

Well, I'm no expert, but when I tried creating a ship in Milkshape nearly every position in the Debug file meant an additional face somewhere on my model facing to the inside.

[X_TheUnknown_X]

Okay, so I havn't been able to solve this annoying double-sided triangles problem. I've tried everything now, exporting again, editing the mesh in NifSkope etc. Nothing has worked  :mad . The good news is, it does load ingame - after about 5 minutes - the bad news is the voxelizer nif file is 200MB large  ! Confusingly, these double-sided triangles only how up on four parts of the mesh, and the amount of double-sided triangles is way more than there should be in those sections.

I can only narrow it down to a problem when exporting the mesh from Blender. When I re-imported the mesh, there were duplicate vertecies appearing everywhere. So, I ask for help from anyone who has the ability to reliably export the model to nif format (I believe theres a specific version of 3DS Max that can do it). If you can help, send me a PM and I'll send the model in 3ds format over. Thanks to anyone who can help.

[eclipse74569]

Okay, so I havn't been able to solve this annoying double-sided triangles problem. I've tried everything now, exporting again, editing the mesh in NifSkope etc. Nothing has worked  :mad . The good news is, it does load ingame - after about 5 minutes - the bad news is the voxelizer nif file is 200MB large  ! Confusingly, these double-sided triangles only how up on four parts of the mesh, and the amount of double-sided triangles is way more than there should be in those sections.

I can only narrow it down to a problem when exporting the mesh from Blender. When I re-imported the mesh, there were duplicate vertecies appearing everywhere. So, I ask for help from anyone who has the ability to reliably export the model to nif format (I believe theres a specific version of 3DS Max that can do it). If you can help, send me a PM and I'll send the model in 3ds format over. Thanks to anyone who can help.

Send it to me I'll help ya

[X_TheUnknown_X]

Good news! I've managed to get rid of all the double-sided triangles  ! The bad newsis that, for some reason, the voxelizer file is still 187MB large. Now I am confused. The total number of faces (even after converting squares to triangles) is a little under 8,000; which is less than a DJ Galaxy or CG Sovereign, so it's not as if the station is packed full of faces.
I can't release this with such a major flaw, so I'm asking for help again. AFAIK, the vox file is used for calucating damage to the mesh ingame, is this true? And are there any ideas on how to solve this problem? Any help would be appreciated.
Unfortunately, If I cannot find a solution to this problem I will probably abandon the project and move on to something else - maybe returning to the spacedock at a later date  .

[Shadowknight1]

Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong, but the vox file isn't necessarily needed.  I mean it is, but iirc, BC creates a new one if one isn't detected.  That's also usually the first troubleshooting anyone does if their ships damage funny is to delete the vox file.  Again, I could be dead wrong, and if so, hopefully someone else can be more helpful. 

[genty]

As far as I can tell from experimenting with models, the larger the model is in game the larger the Vox file will be. If I remember correctly, with larger models you need to decrease the damage resolution in the py file in the scripts/ships folder. I can't remember exactly how to do this though and BC isn't installed on this computer so I can't check, but I 'think' you need to increase the value for each of the damage settings.

[Jb06]

If you want send the nif over to me and ill try sort it out.

~Jb

[X_TheUnknown_X]

Many thanks for the offer JB  , but it seems that Genty put me on the right track with the damage resolution. It appears that the game has two seperate damage res settings, one in the hardpoint file and one in the ship py file. The latter was causing the problem, being set too low. I copied the settings from the stock starbase's py and the voxelizer file has been reduced significantly; by 187MB! There's no vox file at all now - and it still damages quite well  . Well, that's restored my faith in my own modelling ability now  .

The release is still a while away yet, however. There's still some issues with the textures I'd like to change, as well as setting up a new Starbase 12 system. Kirk may be happy to hear there is animated maps and they work properly. In the meantime, here's a few inagme pics to look at:

[Kirk]

Kirk may be happy to hear there is animated maps and they work properly.