imo deforming meshes is FPS-realm stuff (but if someone is doing it, go nuts buddy!)

but sounds like you are making good progress otherwise :)

Deforming meshes are standard stuff, not just FPS only. It's pretty much required for any form of organics.

No. It has SOOOO many practical uses in animation.

made sticky

Yeah, any high detail RTS will have mesh deforming. CoH, Dawn of War... Probably any RTS released recently that features infantry.

all of those have limited troop count

and so could spring with some work, but I don't see what you're getting at. Spring isn't a high detail RTS and never will be, unless someone facelifts (maybe most importantly) map formats and shaders, and makes spring behave like it's supposed to behave for looking as low-detailed as it does.

needs updare for newesr blender

Which specific version of Blender is the "newest" this plugin needs?

hmm it should work with latest (2.48) i'll test it when i'm home next..
are you getting any specific errors?

It won't export an object that has no second texture (which is not too relevant anyway), and it will occasionally mess up my UV's (they will be messed up in the resulted s3o both in game and in Upspring; exporting the model as wavefront obj and then importing from upspring doesn't do that, so it's not a belndz0rz issue)

2.48, yes, that's what i have.

I found this problem too. Some uv points were merged; I think it will merge uvs which are connected as smooth but have a texture seam.

For example gun barrels (canons). It is smooth cylinder, but you must make a texture seam on it to unwrap it. But when it is exported the uvs on this "smooth seam" are merged... For cylinder with 8 faces you will have 7 connected rectangles but last will be stretched across all 7 faces (maybe somehow deformed - swapped cornners, ...).

You can temporary fix this issue by marking edge to be splited on texture seam. So you need all edges, which are marked as texture seams, to be also marked as edge split. But you don't need have texture seams on edges marked as edge split. (I hope you understand, If not i will post some screenshots.)

First, thank you for this great plugin.

Second, here are my feature requests:

1st - fix problem with smoothing. I can provide some testing models/setups; like speheres, boxes, ...; with parts which are mirrored or asembled from arrays and with different smoothing...

Also add object X rottation for easier exporting.


2nd - export only defined hierarchy - best will be export hierarchy from selected base object. This is usefull when you have more objects in scene. For example you can have different model parts for testing or some objects for baking textures, etc.

I think it will be good if you will duplicate whole exporting hierarchy, apply all moddifiers and transformations to each object and after export delete whole duplicated hierarchy. For safety you can make auto saving whole scene to s3oExportBackaup.blend file for example.


3rd - I think there should be possible to create ("compile") textures from separated images, where some images shgould be only grayscale. So you will have each texture in one slot:
- diffuse texture - rgb - without alpha
- team collor texture - grayscale
- reflectivity - grayscale
- illumination (glow/emit) - grayscale
- alpha/transparency texture - grayscale (support spring full transparency /blending/ or only 1 bit?)
- (normal maps, ....)

You can do this like it is - one SpringMat but with more textures. This will allow to see textured model directly in blender.

For me is biggest problem to work with alpha channel in gimp for team collor. I think this can make painting textures easier.

When you will use png file format you will get small files because of good no quality degradation compresion.

ok thanks, i'll look into those bugs, yeah that texture feature would be nice, not sure how strong blender's image manipulation features are, but maybe this would be possible with a separate tool

still others have no issues with getting thier channels right and spliting the texture like this would mess them over. It would be handy to support springs method of using 2 textures also.

It's not issue at all. From my point of view it can make work easier. You can setup blender material to view all textures in proper way directly in blender. You can test it with teamcolor blending, etc. After that you can still setup blender to use textures in two files. It's up to you. Problem is only with exporter. Maybe there can be some autodetection or setup in export script to choose right function for export.

You can setup layers in Gimp or PS to easily blend (multiply) grayscale textures in layers to see how it change the texture. You no need rearange the textures, image channels and set up layers for export.

Also I didn't find solution to see whole texture in Gimp if there is teamcolor texture in alpha channel. I tried turnig it off and some other things, but without success.

disable the alpha channel. Are you gimpers still without layer masks?

I tried this, didn't work. Also deleting the alpha channel didn't help. It seems like Gimp applied the alplha channel to rgb channels and cleared the transparent areas. Blender loaded image right. (talking about arm_annihilator1.tga for CA annihilator)

... Gimp has layer masks but still don't have tree-like layer hierarchy.

tree like?

bad words i think - i mean grouping of layers - it's looks like tree hierarchy...

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.. but this is OT ...