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Ill compromise Ill create a seperate static that acts as a walkaround rail to the top of the tower, so in effect a mapper can add a ladder to one side and climb up to a platform, it's then up to the mapper if he wants that area active+ the extra poly weight. How does that sound?

I plan on making a more traditional tower too, something more modern/millitary.

What help do you need on the statics?

brilliant mate, cant help you, but post it up w/ lightmap samples when your done. really good work.

hmm. in that case it not really worth it but an optional walk around would be cool...the thing i hate about modelling for bf2 is that if you want to change the model later you have to retexture the entire thing so i can imagine why you would be hesitant to add a hallway/enterable tower.. but maybe keep it in mind for the next one.. mappers can come up with many way to use a particular building so the more different functions it can have the better... ie enterable/hallways/ladders etc...

im SURE duckhunt could turn this into a bunker somehow... just give him 3 minutes and rhino would easily have this as the centerpiece of one of his epic airfields to come and i could see this as a run down mountainous airfield that has been overtaken and fortified by a militia faction...



im basically going to be working in mountainous terrain/ eastern europe theater fro the next little while.. does that sound interesting to you? if so .. we hsould have a discussion about some models..as i think what you have made is quite nice..

Cheers

There is an easy way round the retexturing gig, I can seperate the top part of the tower to a standalone mesh, would only need to uv that piece (10 mins work) then recombine with original mesh, uv layers stay intact but having to do it on the 2 lods after dont sound like fun

In fact a solid modelling method would be to model/uv/tex in smaller sections and combine the pieces after, easily broken apart, swap and mix objects, uv's stay mapped correctly and should be able to recombine with the uv's intact on their respective layers.
Collision meshes would need to be built seperately tho to be efficient.
but hey efficient is not always fun right?

Your right tho, these things need to be considered before building, this one was just a test, and surprisingly it worked heh heh.

Eastern Europe sounds like a great idea, yea voice soon to discuss.

exactly...i went throught the same thought process about 6months ago!

i realized after trying a big model that my mental capacity just wasnt high enough to handle that many flattened polys on one screen..hehe... necessity is the mother of invention or so they say.. i think you should detach the tower section boolean the middle out of it and make a straight vertical shaft to the tower floor.. square hole and its set.. it woul make it much more versatile...

in an ideal situation i would also suggest that the entrance be via the interior of the building but hey....you can hope in one hand and #beep# in the other and guess which one will be full first?

good work regardless of your decsision..looking forward to the next one...

Booleans is a function to avoid if ever possible in maya, I can just extrude edges

I have managed to get multiple shaders on one object working which makes me happy.
I have made the interior of main building accesible and joined with hangar.
Platform done. Im about finished with main lod, need to regenerate/modify coillisions and lods now.

With your theme in mind (eastern europe) I have started on a farmhouse/derelict and a church (I have some nice textures for this)

sweet i have a half done church that has been sitting around for ages...im not likely to finish it but if you want some good ref pictures i can dig them up..

adn that is a damn sexy model my friend

Thanks for the offer but I have tons of churchy texture source (probably more than anything else, the brickwork can be superb for textures)

I am asking a favour from a mapper, I need a little box map with some flat ground and a sky so I can test. Something that I can just run/compile (however this engine works) and load up in pr to visually check the buildings.
I don't want to get into level editing.

Lightmaps - I know what these are but how are they generated for this game?

hey jarek...ill get back to you soon but we are about to get into alpha testing for the next release so things will get nuts....i have alot of loose ends to clean up in the next week...i couldnt get your model loaded but im sure thats my fault...could you tell me exaclty what you did with the maya exported files and importing them in? ill try to take a look at the bf2editor fourms as well to see if i can get it... i just havent had enough time yet... 3 maps to twiddle with in the next 2 weeks.....YIKES!!!

anyway...id like to do some modelling with you in the near future...\

just quickly the church idea i had was as follows... front main big doors small side door attached to a storage area which leads into main hall and behind the hall steeple has ladder access to a high bell tower...

anyway... be careful on the texture palletes keep them frugal and preferably reuseable for other models... should look into woodland and urban texure suffixes as well to make modesl fit either style of map...anwya..im gonna be busy...keep in touch...cheers...

no problem, understand fully on the testing.

To get the models from maya to game
Save the mb file to \bfeditor\rawdata (set your maya project scene files to this dir)
open editor in objectmode
file>import> navigate to above dir and select the mb file.
The editor will start crunching data and errors will spit out, the errors are normal and can be ignored.
then look on left menu and you will see it within the dir tree as a staticmesh, drag and drop into game editor.

You must have maya 601 and the cgfx shader plugin setup as the editor parses the maya plugin during model conversion.
Maya and bf2 should be installed to default locations.
If you have any other version of maya installed, remove the xp system environment variable entries for any maya version EXCEPT 6.01 otherwise I found the plugin will reference the wrong version of maya which will not work and you get a string of file not found messages.

Church... I will keep at the models im working with (including the church with your ideas in mind), at worst I can give you a max edited version using fbx format to go from maya to max, from the checking I done the worst needing doing in max after would be resetting the texture paths and export.

good luck with the alpha testing.

well if you can get them on the editor then i just need whatever you have but i dont have maya so the editor wont open them without some maya plugins...these are independent of maya? im still a littel confused hehe..the way i see it...import from MB file...save object in the editor (im assuming its being converted to the editors format) i get that i should just be able to drop it into my editor and boom bobs your uncle right?

(why is BF2 never easy?)

cheers...ill ask mattb he knows everything....

The original files I sent you were from the editor (already converted) but you said you couldnt get them in the editor, they go in np here, maybe ive missed a file somewhere Ill check.
The plugins for maya are split into 2 groups
1 for actual usage in maya 6
cgfxshader.mll - cgfx shaders support

and 1 for the file conversion
MayaParser60.mll
This is the one referenced during .mb conversion to staticmesh by the bf2editor

You may be able to just place this file in a dummy directory structure of
C:\Program Files\Alias\Maya6.0\bin\plug-ins
Instead of installing maya. But thats an educated guess rather than guaranteed.
Will maybe need to add sys environment path of
path C:\Program Files\Alias\Maya6.0\bin\plug-ins\

hey Jarek, taxi has told me hes been having trobble trying to get your control tower to load in the editor, so he handed it over to me for me to have a look.

I've played around with the files trying to work out what structure you might of used but i cant find the right one.

what matt dose when he uploads his statics is he keeps the excat file strucute as he made them in, starting with the objects folder all the way down to the static files. I'm not quite sure how he dose it all the time, you would have to ask him but this makes life very easy. at the moment all I know is where to install your textures, but the mesh files etc i cant work out atall where they go.

really what you should do is have them in this kinda file structre.

all our statics go into the "C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 2\mods\pr_edit\objects\staticobjects\pr\" folder. now some may go into sub folders like the misc etc but for this case you probaly would not need a sub folder.

now this static is a control tower so you would want to give it a name with something along thous lines, control_tower or something would be fine the name isnt all that imporant aslong as you can tell from the name what it is, we dont want statics being called "shingh1y89" for a house
But the name need to all be in lower case for lunix problems.

so for exsample lets use the name "control_tower" for this static, so your folder strucuter would look like this:

note also the mesh folder in there, if you look at our other statics and the stock statics all the .staticmesh files, .collisionmesh files and even the .lightmapsample files go in there.
in the control_tower folder go the .con and .tweak files.

for the textures you should really try to use exsiting pallet textures, unless its a big, unique object like mosue, the carrier, kubra dam etc or is a new texture for a new range of buildings, like our distructible afghan houeses you should really try to use the exsiting textures unless there is really no other option.

anyways good luck, hope this helps and cant wait to see what this thing looks like when it works

Hi mate,
aha ok the mesh resides in a 'Meshes' dir (will teach me to look next time)

What happens is the mb file is saved to \bf2editor\RawData\Meshes from maya.
(docs tell you to set scene files in maya to this location/
The .staticmesh is then generated by bf2editor and placed in
\bf2editor\RawData\Meshes\meshes
which is where I dragged it into the editor from. (to test)

The case sensitivity is noted, thanks. Was the same for et/q3 engine, but for bf2 I made an illegal assumption, the game don't run on linux// heh heh but the servers do thinking about it. Ill corrrect that sorry.
new mesh on its way ASAP with zipped dir structures.

cheers...wow rhino is better at explaining! sorry i didnt get you all that info...

looking forward to seeing your model in game...hehe

n.p Irontaxi, I'll share some of that blame , this game development is always hit and miss, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot.

re the textures, I will be reusing those textures for other models, same for the textures I will be adding, they eventually will be a mix and match set for me to use on my meshes.

This thread should be sticked.

It has so much useful information for those who are interested about modelling in bf2.

It's nice to observe how jarek have made progress in these weeks.

Keep up the good work jarek

'[R-DEV wrote:IronTaxi']wow rhino is better at explaining!

I know, aint it amazing

ok Jarek, i unzipped your files into the correct place, but when i tried to open it said it couldnt find the col mesh files. so i took a look at the file structuer and noticed again, the meshes folder was missing. after crating the meshes folder and putting the col and static meshes in it loaded into the editor.

first thing i noticed it was all black, but when you get close to the model you can see a texture.

this would suggest to me that you probaly dont have a colour texture for your model? or its a detail texture or something... Also the shine off your texture would be to do with your texture, i think it has something to do with the alaph channel of it, maybe make it darker?

Now with regards to the model itself.
Personly I would keep the tower and the hanger seprate, gives more flexibilty for the mapper etc to use it. BF2 also has afew hanger models, but you can import this 1 if you like anyways just to have something diffrent.
At the top of the tower there is also some missing faces here:

Now I would remove the ladder whole from the raling on the outside, and what I would do is make a lift shaft going from the top to the bottom, with a lift too to go with it (lift being a seprate model). then the mapper can use trigger ables to get the lift to work
Also maybe do a flight of stairs going from the top to the bottom of you can speare the pollies
also give the top area more detail, with like desks all the way around the edge with TVs etc on them
Also can we make the tower look less old and ran down? the ralings look like they have been rusting for 60 years
again, maybe try and use the stock textures?

apart from that its comming along well

did the same as you rhino why couldnt i get it loading!!!!!

damn you got the bf2 goodluck stick stuck somewhere..hehe

yeah its a very good first model i think....

we did discuss various ways to tbuild the model.. Jarek was looking just to get the first one doen i think...

anyway...looking forward to the next one!!!

just remember to plan it for versatility... an example might be sloped walls..bad..hard ot attach to other statics...straight walls good..easy to attach to other statics..

Hey were walkin! albeit slowly and with a few stumbles, but anticipated stumbles

Surround, Jarleif has been a great help to me over skype wouldn't have got this far so soon alone for sure.


Ok the mesh...
This is the big tester mesh, once I have the method and it works ill redo the mesh completely. I don't want to start mapping again (just left 3-4 yr active tour of duty doing that, not to mention learning another app) So I have to rely on you guys to make sure the mesh works.

The dark textures, there's a story there.
They were fine, ie no distance/darkness issue but I got cocky and tried using another layer (4th) which created that black effect, I deleted the extra layer but the darkness remains, I suspect the cause is due to I didn't delete a uv set before combining the pieces, wasn't worried about the effect at this stage, more concerned with the mesh/engine mechanics and you getting the mesh in the editor.

re the lift and control room, I will make additions to final mesh and include it, once I know this one is working ok.

Roof.. heh heh scale... oops

Meshes folder... 2x I have screwed that up, shouldn't be a third.

Textures : your going to have a fight with me on this one I am still shakey with the usage of cgfx shader system but improving. I don't want to use existing textures because I don't want my buildings to look vanilla, if I use the existing tex they will. I know they will likely not be easily useable until near a full set is built (blending in) but hopefully they can eventually be used to create a totally different looking map.

Did the mesh work ok in soldier cam? I couldn't load the player model and kits but could walk around and through the building ok.

IronTaxi I gave Rhino a newer mesh than the version supplied to you, it was likely a problem my side not yours mate.