HOW TO: make new Botf 3d Designs, the Video Tutorial

HOW TO: make new Botf 3d Designs, the Video Tutorial; support/discussion/questions

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Dr_Breen
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HOW TO: make new Botf 3d Designs, the Video Tutorial

Post by Dr_Breen »

I finally made it :wink:

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:

Image

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
f34e83dd.jpg (56.27 KiB) Viewed 9451 times
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:

Image

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.lst
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
Last edited by Dr_Breen on Fri Jun 10, 2011 12:57 pm, edited 17 times in total.
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anjel
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Post by anjel »

yeah !!! downloading, waiting anxiously the second part, there is where the magic becomes reallity :D .
I´ve been doing some cutting as you told me, with k7 station, i went mad after a few cuts, but i suppost i need practice, because the technique is really interesting.
Live long and propser
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Post by Dr_Breen »

Part 2 will take another 1-2 weeks. still got the narration to do and to find a new version of UU3d as mine got lost when migrating to Win 7
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Post by Flocke »

where is your water mark? *g*
Just watched part 1, interesting stuff! Could skip some portions but better too much than too few. :)

However, some notes I have:
At 19:03, when you show the middle object and say you think people watching this vid can already guess how it'll look like in botf and that it'll be a mess. I remembered you initially made an example with two boxes but they were seperate objects and think you didn't talk of polygons, but I might be wrong. Just confused a little. And the round tubes, think you didn't split them, don't they cause bsp issues on some view angles as well?
I must confess, I didn't watch the whole hour but skipped alot and jumped around just to see what you're doing. :)

The way you model, I think it's also great to use background images for template to refer to in front/top/left view.

But nice insight to what you do. :D
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Post by Dr_Breen »

Flocke wrote:where is your water mark? *g*
*cough* forgot it *cough*
Flocke wrote:
At 19:03, when you show the middle object and say you think people watching this vid can already guess how it'll look like in botf and that it'll be a mess. I remembered you initially made an example with two boxes but they were seperate objects and think you didn't talk of polygons, but I might be wrong.
yeah I probably should have explained it better there. Just imagine how a mess looks like 8)
Flocke wrote: And the round tubes, think you didn't split them, don't they cause bsp issues on some view angles as well?
watch the whole video
Flocke wrote: I must confess, I didn't watch the whole hour but skipped alot and jumped around just to see what you're doing. :)
there you go :lol: :lol: :lol:
Flocke wrote:
The way you model, I think it's also great to use background images for template to refer to in front/top/left view.
good idea to bad i already recorded part 2. however i was using the "perspective" window almost all the time anyway.
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Post by Flocke »

Dr_Breen wrote:watch the whole video
found it, missed the end part :)
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Post by KrazeeXXL »

np, I'm sure most of us missed the end part of a video now and then 3 of 4 XD

I liked and enjoyed whatching "your show" Dr_Breen. As Flocke said it's nice to get some insight of how you do this stuff. :)
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Post by Silverbreaker »

nice! big thx :-)

@Dr_Breen
youre play elite force 2? - quite impressive
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Post by Dr_Breen »

Silverbreaker wrote:nice! big thx :-)

@Dr_Breen
youre play elite force 2? - quite impressive
yes i do. call me for a battle
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Post by Dr_Breen »

Part 2 was Uploaded.

Edit:

Argh stupid youtube, looks like i need to split up the vids into 15 minute parts. however the other links to the mp4 files are working.

thx Thunderchero
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Post by anjel »

downloading !!!! I´m really interested how continues, the end of the first video was really illuminating, i´ve just made some quick examples, so now i really understand how you do it in the first instance in 3D max, so now let see the second one.
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Post by Dr_Breen »

lol i was still editing the post and somebody is already downloading

@Anjel: Creator part starts at 18:00, everything before is texturing
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Post by Thunderchild »

I can't download the second part, it opens in a seperate tab but i can't hear anything. The youtube-link doesn't function too because the video is removed because its to big.
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Post by thunderchero »

Thunderchild wrote:I can't download the second part, it opens in a seperate tab but i can't hear anything. The youtube-link doesn't function too because the video is removed because its to big.
right click link and "save as" this way you can have a copy on your hard drive and view as needed

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Post by anjel »

well, i´ve took a quick glance, i have to admit that i am impressed about the tranparency in the wormhole texture, didn´t know that, thath blown my mind, now i wonder if it´s possible to add animated gifs....
Btw, i´m curious Doc, why do you use uu3d to unwrap, why don´t you use the tool that came with 3dmax ????
Live long and propser
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