Imported Ships

[crazyeddie]

Need a little help. I have recently started importing some of the ships from Flanker 2 into Lomac. They all need some work on the textures to bring them up to Lomac standards. Where do I find the texture files and how do I open them to work on them.

 

Any help/advice would be appreciated.

[Alfa]

crazyeddie,

 

Well when importing old ship models from Flanker, the easiest way would be to find their associated textures in Flanker's texture folder - here they reside in bitmap format, so you can edit them directly in photoshop or the like.

 

When done, simply drop them into Lock-on's "TempTextures"-folder....then they will be loaded for the imported ships.

 

However, you will be dissapointed with the textures for the Flanker ships - they are very small "stamp" sized textures that are being stretched over the 3D models and therefore have little or no details on them......which in turn makes it practically impossible to improve on Flanker's ship models via texturing.

 

- JJ.

[crazyeddie]

Imported Ships

 

Alfa

 

Many thanks for that advice. I know where to start now.

 

Do you know how to identify which texture files belong to which ship, there are so many and no clear way to establish which texture file is being used on which ship ?.

 

Will let you know if I can find a way to improve anything, if not then at least I have learned something new.

[Alfa]

Alfa

 

Many thanks for that advice. I know where to start now.

 

Do you know how to identify which texture files belong to which ship, there are so many and no clear way to establish which texture file is being used on which ship ?.

 

What you can do is to run notepad or wordpad, then open a 3D shape file of interest(e.g. "spruance.cmd") - you will get a lot of weird symbols, but if you scroll down to the very bottom of the file you will see text references to names of the textures used by the model.

 

This is really the best way to find out what textures are used for a particular model :) .

 

Will let you know if I can find a way to improve anything, if not then at least I have learned something new.

 

I am sure you can make some improvements, but apart from the old Flanker models being very "basic" in terms of 3D detail level, the problem is with the way textures are mapped on these old models......it is nothing like the texturing for Lock-on models.

 

But you are right - fiddling with these things is the best way to learn how it works and come up with new ideas :) .

 

Cheers,

- JJ.

[crazyeddie]

Alfa

 

Thanks for that, I know the type of file you mean but have never looked at them closely. You have been a considerable help and I think I understand the problem now.

 

I have looked at some of the Texture files and as you say very basic, difficult to see how I could do anything with those.

 

Going to have a play with it and see what I can do.

 

Thanks for all your help.

[Alfa]

My pleasure crazyeddie :) .

 

To be honest I think the best way to use the Flanker ship models is as "place holders" when importing(or "activating" rather) the entries in Lock-on.

 

With the recently released 3DS Max plug-ins, it is finally possible to make new 3D models for Lock-on - and here the "sleeping" ship entries are very good subjects(the best actually) for such projects, since the entire code for their operation(radars/weapons systems) is present and fully functional :) . Moreover, with the Modelviewer tool, the Flanker ships models can also be used for checking which arguments are being "called" for the varies weapon mounts/radar antennas of a particular ship entry when animating those on a new 3D model.

 

But ok - I know this requires access to 3DS Max and some modelling experience to be relevant......but it is an exiting prospect nevertheless :) .

 

Cheers,

- JJ.

[33rd_bratpfanne.]

COOL!

 

ATutorial to insert new, working, highly detailed Ships in LockOn:D :D :D

 

^^^HINT HINT HINT

 

Someone?

 

....Dreaming of a whole Naval Addon...

 

S!

 

Brati