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[Mission_bug]

I've now imported my first 3d model succefully into Gmax! 

Great to know Per, you are now on the way to years of daily frustration and constant "what the fuck" moments now you have taken the road of the Black arts, you are truly lost forever to the life that was before.

Wishing you all the very best, Pete.

[mandrill]

As most folks generally want to add objects to the game please take a look at the KevinP tutorial for IL-2 buildings it is a must for anyone making stuff for IL-2 as it tells you all you need to know about construction and damage models and all the necessary stuff to make them work:

http://allaircraftsimulations.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=82&t=32219

I worked my way through the KevinP tutorials over the Canada Day long weekend. There are 5 of them: - 2 introductory tutorials on making ground plates and then skinning them and 3 basic building construction videos. The videos cover constructing a live mesh, collision mesh and dead mesh, skinning them and exporting them to IL-2. It includes a review of the Buggybuggy Exporter script and Lith unwrap.

KevinP is a great tutorial writer and the tutorials are pretty straightforward and very informative. (There are a couple of points here and there where the narrative isn't detailed enough and the user has to start clicking buttons, etc to come up with his own solution. But nothing major!)

But here is the problem. Kevin's tutorials simply don't appear to be what object builders are actually doing. I compared his exercises to Canon's England and France objects and Canon's stuff has no hooks, for example. But Canon's stuff works perfectly well! Canon's buildings also have no shadow meshes!

And Canon's dead.mesh objects have 2 levels of destruction, which is something not covered by KevinP.

So Kevin's stuff is a must-use, but with certain caveats.

[Zoran395]

Agree with you Mandrill.
I fought my way through GMax without these tutorials and I use a simpler way:
- Simplistic box for collision.
- Single shadow mesh.
- No hook.
- No smoothing groups at all.
- No LOD03 for simple objects.

I also use Buggy-Buggy exporter and a listener so no copy/paste in text files.

[mandrill]

i thought of trying a simple box for collisions too, but I am not there yet.

Canon's objects have no hooks OR shadow meshes. I wonder if these are necessary at all. The test object from KevinP's tutorial loaded happily and looked just fine without a hook or shadow mesh.

Have you worked out how to do the 2-level destruction in your dead.mesh's??

[Zoran395]

A lot of what is around for modelling has been brought by Il-2 experts who model planes/ships. This is 100'000 times more complex than a barn with 16 polys.
They need hooks to link effects and have complex hierarchies with the numerous parts of their models moving.
They need serious LOD management between walking around an aircraft on the ground and seeing a foe miles away in the skies. The same goes for shadows and destruction levels. Lets not even mention classes and all the coding required...

Back to the barn made of 16 polys:

• I always do a shadow (when you fly in the morning or late afternoon in Leningrad Oblast you get very long shadows...) but I cannot see the point of a hook. You still get the smoke/flames generated when the object is hit, without a hook. So I normally would use a clone of my LOD1 for the shadow mesh with UMW removed.
• If LODs are in the range of 3000 or more, what will you see of the shadow? The barn is a dark little speck anyway...
• You definitely need a working dead.mesh otherwise the game can hang when the barns are hit and cannot go up in flames.
• I am happy with a collision mesh for the 16-poly barn to be just a cube (6 polys then). You can make the box as high as the roof ridge or stop it at the gutters level. A vehicle will hit it and you will still be in trouble if you try to fly through it.

For 2-level destruction, I cannot really see the point for the small barn (you hit it with an explosive shell, it goes up in flames).
It would make more sense for a large city block but I prefer to use the same mesh as the Live object with destruction only represented on the texture. It shows that the building has been hit but has not completely collapsed.
I think that the multiple levels of destruction are plane-centric, you need to first have the bullet hits, then loose a rudder or part of your wing then you explode in pieces.

I focus on objects with super low poly count and the smallest number of texture/mesh calls because I have a large city of 3.5 million people in mind. I also try to balance the size of the textures (indexed files, no transparency if possible) with the visual aspect. FPS when I fly over that big city is the critical test with of course the visual enchantment ...

[mandrill]

Thanks for some very good suggestions, Zoran.

Will you get shadows without a shadow mesh?? Canon and other modders do not use shadow meshes.

[Zoran395]

Will you get shadows without a shadow mesh??

Have a try! On the very first objects I did, I missed the shadow mesh and was wondering what was wrong with my destroyed building: burned wood post or beams look better when they project a shadow, especially if you have other buildings with shadows nearby.
The other thing is that if I bother doing BumpH files for textures, surely I can get into the effort of making a shadow mesh. It takes less than a minute to do!

Here is something else. I have been using Autodesk products for years now (AutoCAD, Revit, Navisworks) and GMax is just another one I just added to the list. I use the same keyboard and mouse techniques to get the job done faster.
In short, if you are right-handed, mouse actions all on the right side of the screen and keyboard shortcuts on the top left corner (around the 'escape' key).

To build the 16 poly barn there are a limited number of actions you run all the time and it is worth streamlining the process by tweaking GMax interface:

This one has 38 polys by the way... and the Yandex Screenshot Tool is great

There are lots of changes you can do to the user interface to suit your design technique.
It means that you can save yourself from having to scroll down a mile-long list to pick "Unwrap UMW" 60 billion times.

[mandrill]

Those are very good ideas!

And I like the building you made as well!

What is the Yandex screenshot tool?

[Zoran395]

He he, the "Collapse Stack" I just started using, amazing how a single click on a button is faster than a right-click-select-click...

I am on Yandex for cloud services and their Windows desktop client is shipped with a screenshot tool with which you can annotate + share online very quickly.

[Mission_bug]

Hello guys, the only parts I have made so far myself are the various items it the KevinP tutorials but they give you
a good grounding in how to go about it.


Take a look through this thread, you could find some inspiration from the fun and games I had importing Geezer's objects
into IL-2:

https://www.sas1946.com/main/index.php/topic,50259.msg548693.html#msg548693


I agree with Zoran that shadows are a must, I also use the co-commons to provide damage, however, lods are something
I have yet to experiment with even though I think they are as essential as the other parts.

Even without anything else a shadow helps provide the appearance of all times of day and different time zones, a must
for the immersion in any game I think.

For the hit box (co-common) I will usually make it take the shape of a building although just a simple box is adequate
for most objects, for buildings such as hangars I try and provide three, one either side and a top so that your vehicles
and aircraft can move into them and through them.  These are really important not only for damage effect but there is
nothing more strange than watching a vehicle go through something in game that it should not.

I had a go at making a hit box for the Sky Scraper objects once but the game seems to have a limit to how high it can be
and still work, try flying through those buildings it is very odd, guess the 1C team never envisaged a America Bomber
hitting New York during 1946 development.

Generally I will always provide a dead object of some sort, preferably in a actual damage state but definitely with at
least a darkened texture to give some indication of damage, even from the air the difference is noticeable and remember
also that for campaigns movies are made that take the player into close contact with the objects you make.

A word about shadows, I usually just make a copy of the object itself and use that, however, be aware that if the object
had two textures that will give you a odd shadow effect.  The trick is to clone your object and re apply only one of the textures
and then use that as the shadow, it will look odd in your 3D programme but in game it is just a shadow.


Wishing you all the very best, Pete.

[Zoran395]

A word about shadows, I usually just make a copy of the object itself and use that, however, be aware that if the object
had two textures that will give you a odd shadow effect.  The trick is to clone your object and re apply only one of the textures...

Good to know, same with the size limitation you mentioned for the skyscraper.
There is limit as well for ed_m01 files in maps (I found it playing mad scientist in my lab...).
For the double texture I wonder if removing the UMW map + removing the material would do?
I am yet to have a double-texture object, living in the 16-poly barn world !

[mandrill]

Pete,

Why don't you try 2 or 3 smaller collision boxes, one above the other?? It might be a size limitation, not a height limitation.