Hints and tips for milkshape for buildings with IWTE

[xHolyCrusader]

maybe - talking to wd about it- though as they don't reproduce exactly the same results that might get you problems where the reset structures meet the others

Hmm, having the option to select multiple structures to do the resetting on at a time could be a solution.

On the aztec gates, is the shading information stored in the .mesh or in the .anim/.event files? Do you think it can be edited somehow?

[makanyane]

On the gate shading thing, could the data for two different shading settings be stored in one animation file? I had a look at the vanilla aztec files again and actually only one of the 4 gates is set as very dark. This also is the reason why I even got the issue with a just exported gate. However in the vanilla settlement all 4 gates use the same animation and yet the lighting is correct on all of them when the animation kicks in.
Would be cool if you could look into this, its not too important though, for now I can use the darker version, eventhough it looks a little out of place^^ Btw can you think of any other vanilla settlement that uses this gate type or is the aztec city the only one?

Yes and no... The bits in blockset/animations are all the same, so it's not anything to do with those or the anim meshes. But the bits within the cities' .animinstances file do vary. I'm not sure which one IWTE picks by default to copy if you re-assign an anim/collision but presumably either first or last currently, we hadn't noticed that causing such a bad mismatch before, but now that looks like an problem, wd will have a look at fixing that so its selectable which one you're copying which should help...

[makanyane]

Hmm, having the option to select multiple structures to do the resetting on at a time could be a solution.

On the aztec gates, is the shading information stored in the .mesh or in the .anim/.event files? Do you think it can be edited somehow?

unfortunately the .animinstances file which is the only one that's unique for each animated object. & compressed which doesn't help in amending it...
anyway wd will be off to have a look at that this week - not promising anything...

[xHolyCrusader]

unfortunately the .animinstances file which is the only one that's unique for each animated object. & compressed which doesn't help in amending it...
anyway wd will be off to have a look at that this week - not promising anything...

Any news on this? If not no problem as I figured out a way to make it use the animation from the not dark gate object. Before picking the animation from the vanilla aztec city I deleted the structure that contained the very dark gate objects, this way it had to pick from one of the not dark ones, I wonder why I didnt think of that earlier...

[makanyane]

Ooops - sorry entirely forgot this (and we've been away a bit...)

Yes that works - think we did it before to avoid wall anim chunks with the 'disco lighting' effect.


anyway have reminded wd

[xHolyCrusader]

Finally I have something (hopefully) useful to share in this thread, maybe my previous posts in here can be moved into the general discussions thread or deleted as they rather cause confusion^^

1) Alright, so I think I finally figured how to fix the smoothing issues on round objects from vanilla, not sure how obvious this is/was to others but welding seems to (besides welding overlapping vertices) also apply a smoothing group to the welded model parts.
A quick video showing the process, in the end you can also see how moving/rotating the object around doesnt affect the smoothing:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

2) Very minor tip, rotate models around the origin instead of "center of mass" to keep things aligned with the grid.

3) Use the region uv map tool to get accurate uv unwraps on doors, windows, arches, anything that is not a plane essentially. I suck at explaining in words, so here goes another video showing how its done, also shows the 4x4 plane creation/uv-ing bits mak explains in the first post:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: