HOW TO: make new Botf 3d Designs, the Video Tutorial
Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2010 12:35 pm
I finally made it 
The following video Tutorial will show you how to make a compleetly new 3d Model for BotF, be it a ship or a station.
The video Tutorial is split up into two parts, as streaming is not allowed on afc you will have to download the whole file before being able to play it. For ppl using a slow connection I suggest a download manager as the mp4 files are quite large .
a good download manager might be DownThemAll!
Part 1: This video shows you the actual modeling process. As modeling for BotF is a little bit different than modeling for newer Games. At the end there's some sort of quality control by loading the model into creator and check if it seperates correctly.
Tools used:
-Autodesk 3ds max 9
-Multigen Creator 3.0 (required)
Other tools that work instead of above:
-Blender
-Lightwave
-gmax
Part 1 (mp4, 133 MB)
Part1.1 (youtube)
Part1.2 (youtube)
Part1.3 (youtube)
Part1.4 (youtube)
Part 2: This Video shows you what you have to do once the modeling process is done. It starts with adding a texture to the model. After that it shows how you add phaser hardpoints to it. Later on you will see how you build up the BSP database and convert it into the BotF .Hob data type. The last few minutes are about editing the trek.exe and inserting your new model into BotF.
Tools used:
-Ultimate unwrap 3d 3.0
-Adobe Photoshop CS 3
-Multigen Creator 3.0 (required)
-WinRar (you have to use winRar as WinZIP corrupts the Stbof.res file)
-Dcer's Ultimate Editor
-The Conversion filters
Other tools that work instead of above:
-GIMP
-Paint
-lith unwrap
Part 2 (mp4, 177 MB)
Part2.1 (youtube)
Part2.2 (youtube)
Part2.3 (youtube)
Hints once you watched trough the video
Model orientation
Help my model is flying backwards!!! be sure your model is oriented like this when you load it into creator:
Hex editing trek.exe
In trek.exe you do the following:
Your hex editor has to be set to read 16 bytes per row. Now search for the code you gave to your model (like km3 in the example below) but pay attention every code apears 2-9 times in trek.exe...take the last one your editor can find.
in the picture below you see how it should look right now:
Red: your shipcode (Km3)
Green: the number of phasers your ship will have. this can be any number between 1 an 16 but it may NOT be higher than the number of slots your model has (results in a crash). as you see the the number of phasers is set to 08
Blue: shipscale, this value is stored as a 32bit floating point value. as you see in the example the scale is 33 33 33 40. your hex editor should be able to convert this value into a decimal value like in the example below:
as you see the scale of the ship named km3 is ~2.8 (2.799999...)
yellow: Phaserslots...when you set the green value to 08 as in the example, then set the first 8 bytes here to 01 and the rest to 00.
Also be sure that the area between red (shipcode) and blue (scale) is completly filled with doublezeroes (00) except for the green part (shipscale). these bytes handle the damagetextures and we did not figure out yet how to use them.
Commands for the BotF Conversion filters:
Sizes and filenames of the Targas:
i_[name]30.tga --> 30x30 pixels //Example i_hm130.tga
i_[name]60.tga --> 60x50 pixels
i_[name]120.tga --> 120x100 pixels
i_[name]170.tga --> 170x142 pixels
i_[name]w.tga --> 120x100 pixels //this is the wireframe
The following video Tutorial will show you how to make a compleetly new 3d Model for BotF, be it a ship or a station.
The video Tutorial is split up into two parts, as streaming is not allowed on afc you will have to download the whole file before being able to play it. For ppl using a slow connection I suggest a download manager as the mp4 files are quite large .
a good download manager might be DownThemAll!
Part 1: This video shows you the actual modeling process. As modeling for BotF is a little bit different than modeling for newer Games. At the end there's some sort of quality control by loading the model into creator and check if it seperates correctly.
Tools used:
-Autodesk 3ds max 9
-Multigen Creator 3.0 (required)
Other tools that work instead of above:
-Blender
-Lightwave
-gmax
Part 1 (mp4, 133 MB)
Part1.1 (youtube)
Part1.2 (youtube)
Part1.3 (youtube)
Part1.4 (youtube)
Part 2: This Video shows you what you have to do once the modeling process is done. It starts with adding a texture to the model. After that it shows how you add phaser hardpoints to it. Later on you will see how you build up the BSP database and convert it into the BotF .Hob data type. The last few minutes are about editing the trek.exe and inserting your new model into BotF.
Tools used:
-Ultimate unwrap 3d 3.0
-Adobe Photoshop CS 3
-Multigen Creator 3.0 (required)
-WinRar (you have to use winRar as WinZIP corrupts the Stbof.res file)
-Dcer's Ultimate Editor
-The Conversion filters
Other tools that work instead of above:
-GIMP
-Paint
-lith unwrap
Part 2 (mp4, 177 MB)
Part2.1 (youtube)
Part2.2 (youtube)
Part2.3 (youtube)
Hints once you watched trough the video
Model orientation
Help my model is flying backwards!!! be sure your model is oriented like this when you load it into creator:
Hex editing trek.exe
In trek.exe you do the following:
Your hex editor has to be set to read 16 bytes per row. Now search for the code you gave to your model (like km3 in the example below) but pay attention every code apears 2-9 times in trek.exe...take the last one your editor can find.
in the picture below you see how it should look right now:
- f34e83dd.jpg (56.27 KiB) Viewed 9525 times
Green: the number of phasers your ship will have. this can be any number between 1 an 16 but it may NOT be higher than the number of slots your model has (results in a crash). as you see the the number of phasers is set to 08
Blue: shipscale, this value is stored as a 32bit floating point value. as you see in the example the scale is 33 33 33 40. your hex editor should be able to convert this value into a decimal value like in the example below:
as you see the scale of the ship named km3 is ~2.8 (2.799999...)
yellow: Phaserslots...when you set the green value to 08 as in the example, then set the first 8 bytes here to 01 and the rest to 00.
Also be sure that the area between red (shipcode) and blue (scale) is completly filled with doublezeroes (00) except for the green part (shipscale). these bytes handle the damagetextures and we did not figure out yet how to use them.
Commands for the BotF Conversion filters:
Code: Select all
CD /D [Your working path]
flttohot [filename.flt] -sXYScale //with XY being a decimal number
Registex [filename.flt] -s
Regiscol color.lst
hottohob [filename.hot] -ttexture.lst -ccolor.lsti_[name]30.tga --> 30x30 pixels //Example i_hm130.tga
i_[name]60.tga --> 60x50 pixels
i_[name]120.tga --> 120x100 pixels
i_[name]170.tga --> 170x142 pixels
i_[name]w.tga --> 120x100 pixels //this is the wireframe
.
