New to VS and I want to start skinning...

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Flowers Of Naivety
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New to VS and I want to start skinning...

Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Hi all... I just started playing VS about 4 days ago... Since then I have only gotten liek 15 hours of sleep total... I used to play the Wing Commander games when I was little, and got into Escape Velocity on my old mac, butI'm addicted to this game now.
I also was just kicked out of the HIT (Half-Life Improvement Team) forums for "signature disobediance" and now I don't really have anything to skin... So I wanted to try my hands at this...
I found all the textures and what not but is there a way to see the UV maps?
I want to first do the Llama since thats what I am still using (heavily upgraded.)

Any other ships that you guys would like to see a new skin on?

And what ship would you recomend for someone that loves the Llama?
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Post by Halleck »

Awesome! Texture artists are hard to come by.

Here's a little info- game meshes are stored in a format called bfxm. I think it stands for 'binary format xmesh' or somesuch. It's a compiled version of the xmesh format, which is another format the devs created for this game, that represents meshes in XML.

To see the UV mapping of the ship in question, you'll first need to convert its bfxm file into something your modeller can read. There is a handy command-line utility in /bin/ called mesher.exe that can convert between obj, bfxm, and xmesh.

If you use blender or wings 3d, you can get xmesh import plugins. Otherwise, obj will work fine. Either way, you'll need to invoke mesher.

First, copy the bfxm you want to convert into /bin/ so mesher can read it.
Now, open a command prompt. CD into /wherever/vegastrike-0.4.3/bin/ and run mesher.exe.
It will tell you what commands it accepts. For example, this is how you would convert llama.bfxm into an obj file:

Code: Select all

mesher llama.bfxm llama.obj boc
Once you've converted the mesh into a format your modelling suite can read, just import it and peruse the UV coordinates as needed.

Hope this helps!
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Post by zaydana »

<shameless plug>
Atm, we have a helluva lot of unskinned models... if you want you could help even more than reskinning current models by skinning some of our unskinned ones. We have one massive station model that needs skinning that I can send you if you want, otherwise just follow halleck's advice above :) If ur interested, pm me.
(cherryh station for those of you who know what that is)
</shameless plug>
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Post by Halleck »

FYI, zaydana is reffering to this station model:
Image
(click for large version)
Flowers Of Naivety
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Oh god I am not even gonna try that model right now...

Hmm I am doing things alot different then you guys I think... I am just using photoshop to make the skins and overwriting in the Units folder (i made back ups) and looking at them in the game...

If I am gonna do something else I will need to get those programs though because right now I only have 1.5mil in credits and don't really know where to get each ship...

I don't have any experience modeling. I have the ability to skin, and from what people say I am pretty good. But they are all user made models that have been UVmapped and all that...
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

I know double post...

I tried for a little while with the model program things... I have to idea what the heck I am doing...

Could someone maybe be kind enough to get the UV maps for me?

Oh and here's something I made in about 20 minutes... (I get way too into thegames I am playing)

Image
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Post by Major »

The models could use some damagemaps. These are additional textures that fade in when the ships get damage.

You could take any texture and put some rust, holes, scratches etc on it so it looks damaged.

For example you can use the wayfarer.png in the units/plowshare directory and paint some "damage" on the texture. Then you can save the new texture as "damagemap.png"

(And somebody else surely can tell you how to put the damagemap into the bxfm format)
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Heck yeah I could easily do that... Well the photoshop part at least...

Are damage maps ingame yet?

Heres what i have after a couple minutes...

Still need to make more "battle damage" (hehe remember the Jurasic Park Trez with the battle damage?) and make it look real grimy and worn out, pluss the bump map or whatever...
Image
And a few minutes later the bumbmap is done up a teeny bit...
Image
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Post by klauss »

Nice.

Damage maps are only enabled for models which have them (atm), so if you create new damage maps (that's the idea), you would have to activate them.

To do that, you have to use mesher to go to-from .xmesh.

For simple monolithic models (I'll clarify later), the process is:

mesher <anyfile.bfxm> <anyfile.xmesh> bxc
edit .mesh file, where it says
... texture="blabla.png"/>
add
... texture="blabla.png" texture2="blabla_damage.png"/>

Then, back to bfxm: mesher <anyfile.xmesh> <anyfile.bfxm> xbc

About monolithic or not: Many models require more than one texture. If that is the case, since xmesh can only have one texture, multiple xmesh files are needed. On those cases, when you convert from bfxm to xmesh, a lot of other files are created, named "0_1.xmesh, 0_2.xmesh, etc". Sometimes, 1_1 and 2_1 will appear. What happens is that meshes are grouped in LOD levels and elements. Usually, there are as many elements as textures. So, a model with 3 textures will have 3 elements. Each element may be LODded, so 0_1 would be the first LOD downsize, and 0_2 the second one. That's FYI, but from your point of view, you have to edit them all, and replace the textures for them all. To merge them back in one bfxm, you do this:

mesher <firstfile.xmesh> <file.bfxm> xbc
mesher <secondfile.xmesh> <file.bfxm> xba
...
mesher <lastfile.xmesh> <file.bfxm> xba

(notice that subsequent mesher calls use xba instead of xbc)

Hope it's not overwhelming.
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Uh huh....

Heh... That is a little overwhelming... Oh well... Like I said modelling isnt my fortay (or however you say it).

So there are other textures, not just the ones found smack dab in the Unit/Plowshare folder?
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Post by klauss »

So there are other textures, not just the ones found smack dab in the Unit/Plowshare folder?
That's not what I said, but yes. There are others. But I don't think any of them are damage maps.

Anyway, if you just don't get it, you can post the textures and one of us can get them ingame.
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Heh I am just getting used to it thats all... I am just so used to skinng Half-Life models...

Hey about how long do you guys think it would take to learn to model ships? Because I would really love to get the USS Sulaco from Aliens into here. But it would probably take quite a while just to learn...

http://images.google.com/images?q=sulac ... a=N&tab=wi
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Post by Halleck »

If you don't want to get into the technical side of things, no sweat. We need texture artists too badly to force them to do all the manual labor. :wink:

Send the damage maps my way (fadookie AT gmail DOT com) and I can do all the neccessary dirty work with the xmeshes.

Also, if you really need a uv chart for a specific mesh, tell me and I can try to generate one for you.
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Cool dude. yeah I am all fo doing some skins for yall. I need something to do now that I can't get a hold of Half-Life stuff... And i can't figure out Half-Life 2 skinning and the models ingame have horrid maps...

And i havent liked a game this much since Half-life, man this game is freakin sweet.

I'l work some more on the damage maps tonight, but i gotta play the game some more...
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Post by Major »

You can do nice effects when you draw a black line at the border of a texture and use the smudge tool to move some parts into the hull of the ship:
Image
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Yeah that plowshare I have been editing has quite a bit of the black smudges.

Hey would it be wortth getting a joystick for this game? Or should I just stick to the mouse and keyboard?
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Post by Anax »

I'm a fan of the Joystick, and it feels more authentic. only problem is last time i tried the game (havnt run it since about august last year) there were some problems with the joystick throttle. Does anyone know if this has been fixed yet?

Joystick itself had no problems... oh except i think some of the axes were around the wrong way, but a quick edit of the config file fixed that.

But yeah, joystick is definitely heaps more fun
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Heh well then I geuss I will be getting a joystick... Maybe even later today...

Hey could some one maybe get me the UV map to the Khaan ship... U keep seeing it's chrome butt all over the galxy and it's getting old...
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Hey what the hell is all this I hear about Cvs? What is it? ANd why are people talking about it?

And also, I converted the Half-Life soundtrack (for my own use) to .ogg, how do I get it in game? I saw something about putting them in a config file or something under combat and somethign else, but I can't find it now...
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Post by jackS »

Flowers Of Naivety wrote: Hey could some one maybe get me the UV map to the Khaan ship
The entire Kahan model is slated for replacement.
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

Ah ok then... I'l keep an eye out for another ship then.
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Post by pincushionman »

You may wish to coordinate with JackS (*points up two posts*) since he's in charge of whatever category of work skinning would fall under. Also, he has access to a lot (I hope) of unskinned models that have been sent in; I don't think these are in the dataset you can download from the site or CVS. He also has a better idea of which ships most need new skins.
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Post by Flowers Of Naivety »

K then JACK, tell me what needs skinning... besides damage maps, which I will start working on again, I SWEAR!

Heheh

I doubt my mod idea will come true so I am glad to work on VS...
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Post by hurleybird »

If you want to, you could make new paint jobs for current ships for use with different factions.
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Post by Halleck »

Flowers Of Naivety wrote:Hey what the hell is all this I hear about Cvs? What is it? ANd why are people talking about it?
CVS stands for Concurrent Versions System. It is a version control repository hosted on sourceforge.net.

Basically, in-between releases, developers still work on the game and make changes to the CVS copy of the game and source code. Users can "check out", or download the intermediate copy of the game, which is generally reffered to as "getting the cvs".

You can think of the cvs as a development version of the game. It usually has more features and more bugs than the current release. When everyone feels it's ready, the cvs is compiled, bundled up into installers for various platforms, and made into an official release.
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