Exporting from 3ds Max for Spring

[VelvetClaw]

Hi,

If I export a 3ds Max mesh with physique and UVW mapping points in place into a 3ds format for Blender, will Blender recognise the settings I put in place for the mesh? I don't want to port models I created for Rise of Nations mods for Spring, only to discover I have to go through the rigmarole of unwrapping and physiqueing again. My sponsors will not do this for me.

[SwiftSpear]

The issue you'll likely have, as I understand it, is that spring doesn't have any type of physique support currently written into it. Spring animation works well with robots and tanks, it's not currently set up to handle technologies designed to make higher level biological character animation easier.

Keep in mind, the engine was built on the framework of the Total Annihilation engine, and the TA engine was made before animation of biological things really worked in any more than a primitive way. We've updated many of our technologies, but our engine still isn't ideal for biological animations, it doesn't fully support skeletal animation yet even last I checked. To some degree however, this makes sense, because spring units have many responsively animated parts. For example, turrets that need to be able to aim at their target while the unit is moving in an entirely different direction, and until recently, skeletal animation wasn't really good for that kind of thing. We aren't so modern that we've implemented a blending system yet as far as I'm aware.

You shouldn't have problems with the UV maps. UV mapping is a very common technology and spring supports it just fine.

[Karl]

However, spring supports only 2 UV-mapping
1. The main coloring and team-color
2. Shinyness and Glow and Bloom and stuff,
yo

[Beherith]

However, spring supports only 2 UV-mapping
1. The main coloring and team-color
2. Shinyness and Glow and Bloom and stuff,
yo

Wrong. Spring supports 1 UV coord per vertex. Engine supports a pair of texture for color, teamcolor, glow, reflectivity and 1-bit alpha. Additional textures such as normal maps are supported through Lua shaders.

[VelvetClaw]

However, spring supports only 2 UV-mapping
1. The main coloring and team-color
2. Shinyness and Glow and Bloom and stuff,
yo

Wrong. Spring supports 1 UV coord per vertex. Engine supports a pair of texture for color, teamcolor, glow, reflectivity and 1-bit alpha. Additional textures such as normal maps are supported through Lua shaders.

So that means if I import my armada of medieval-style ships into Spring, there should be almost no problems? textures are nothing to me, with a whole batch of Minecraft mods I can pick and assmilate any texture I want for my models.

I'm not too worried with the problems with skeletons for Spring. I will just create some sample cavalrymen, infantry and elephants, and then see where that heads to.

[SwiftSpear]

Ya, you'll have to reanimate them, like I say, we don't use a standard animation system last I checked. But models and textures should work pretty much perfectly, albeit maybe a bit of weirdness caused by the team color system, but that should be easy to fix.