Wolfire Games Forums

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doh why'd I have to use wings 3d lol well I suppose I could get blender.

You can use Wings3D as well if you stick to the rules that

1. Your model consists entirely of cubes (90° at the edges, except for 2 triangles forming a quad)
2. The cubes form 1 mesh altogether (join them at some point)
3. You've applied at least basic UV mapping for all faces (1 texture)
4. All faces are triangles
5. You export to .x
6. There's only 1 mesh in the .x file

Obviously I can't make a tutorial for Wings3D, but if you figure out how to do this with it and the resulting .x is converted successfully, you could post a tutorial here; I'd change the thread title in that case.

Edit: You could start with 2 cubes, for example, that way we'd have a precedent.

Edit: Also, for further rules that enlarge the flexibility, see here.

can i use 3ds max ?

Last time I checked, there was a .x export plugin available for 3DSMax. So you should be able to do it.

Religiously stick to the rules though. Can't stress this enough. It would be a shame if you spent 2 hours on a model just to find out it doesn't work.

If you figure it out, same goes for you, a tutorial would be great!

the only things with x in them that I can export in wings are .fbx and .rwx

You may have to find the appropriate plugin if you're talking about 3dsmax.

Here's one: http://www.andytather.co.uk/Panda/direc ... loads.aspx

I don't know how good that is, you will have to try it out.

I am currently modeling pieces for building houses (door, wall, floor, stairs, window, roof) and I can tell you that whether or not a converted model works has a chance of about 50%.

So the directions I posted above are not sufficient for any model you can think of. Why some .solids work and others don't seems to be random right now.

If you really want to try modeling for Lugaru, prepare to get frustrated because what you're sending me may not work in the end although you stuck to the rules posted. I'm sorry for that. I don't even know whether I'll be able to fix that, to be honest.

I gathered more knowledge on what modeling techniques work.

I think I know a way to make .solids that have arbitrary shapes, do not exclusively consist of cubes and don't make Lugaru crash.

Begin with a cube and extrude a face. Approximate your desired shape by extruding the cube's faces over and over.

Subdividing:
Whatever you do, don't subdivide triangles or quads adjacent to triangles.
Don't subdivide quads unless you subdivide each edge 3 times, for example with a knife subdivide (Shift-K in blender).

When you're done, smoothen the vertices until you're happy.

You can extrude quads as well as triangles. Just don't forget to convert all quads to triangles when you're done (Ctrl-T in blender).

Either use quads or triangles, nothing else.

Why is that so? I don't know. I just did some modeling to try and feel out the boundaries of this mess; that's how I successfully made working models all the time.

You can still join meshes that are made with these rules in mind.

An example:


Edit: Also, you can translate / scale / rotate vertices, edges and faces as you wish.

Now get to work

Count Roland wrote:the only things with x in them that I can export in wings are .fbx and .rwx

Sorry Count Roland, my previous reply to you didn't help, I guess.

You need to update your Wings 3D to a non-stable version.

See here for a topic about this.

You can get the appropriate version here.

Hope this helps

thanks it helped a bunch I'll upload some stuff soon, and it just occured to me, would it be possible to reverse the transition between .x and .solid so you could make a .solid file a .x file?

Count Roland wrote:thanks it helped a bunch I'll upload some stuff soon, and it just occured to me, would it be possible to reverse the transition between .x and .solid so you could make a .solid file a .x file?

That'll be a feature of a future release.

I updated the first post. The URL where the converter is at has been added.

this is awesome, I hope that this stuff gets alot of attention, unfortunately the only things I am really interested in making are weapons, and those I don't believe I would be able to make without knowing the scale of the current weapons, anyway I can wait for further releases and may mess around with the current stuff

Count Roland wrote:this is awesome, I hope that this stuff gets alot of attention, unfortunately the only things I am really interested in making are weapons, and those I don't believe I would be able to make without knowing the scale of the current weapons, anyway I can wait for further releases and may mess around with the current stuff

If you insert a custom .solid as a weapon, it is invisible. This may very well be related to the scale, but I'm not sure.. I'm still at it though.

Count Roland, you cracked it without knowing!!!!!

Weapons have to be at least 20x bigger than normal solids. Also, you have to invert all normals.

So in blender, you first scale all vertices of the model in edit mode, then you flip the normals. It's that simple.

Here's how you do it in detail:

In Edit mode (TAB to switch between Object and Edit mode for a selected object),
press A until all vertices are selected.
Then press S to scale and move the mouse away from the indicated center; in the lower left, you see how much you've scaled all vertices.
Once you've scaled so that your model is 20x bigger (going from the default cube, of course),
press LMB to confirm,
then press W and then 9 (not on the NumBlock). The latter flips all normals of selected faces / vertices.

That's it!

You may have to rotate and translate your model so that it looks into the right direction and is at the right position.

After all is done, make the UV map, apply scale and rotations in Object mode and export your new weapon.

Hot damn.

Edit: blender dimensions that make sense for a sword shaped like this: DimX: 1000
DimY: 200
DimZ: 160

(Approximations)

To check the dimensions, press N in Object mode; this opens the Transform Properties.

The handle has to be at around (0,0,0), the pike or whatever it's called has to be towards global +X.

wow lol that's awesome I'm glad I finally helped with something that's like the first time in my life I've done that, lol.

Edit: I'm afraid you may be getting sick of me asking questions but have you tried a similar trick with the rabbit .solid as you did with the weapons, like inverting it?