Hi,
we just started using gamestudio for a project; in which we are modeling a small town. We are using 3ds max for the modeling, not the med. Each house in the town will consist of approximately 600 - 800 triangles and there will be around 100 houses in the town. Other than that we are planning to model trees, rocks and animals, villagers that are walking around. We are considering to use texturemaps of size 512x512 (1024 would be even better..) and other than that bump, normal, reflection maps if we can.

I was wondering if; after modeling the houses in 3ds max is it possible to texture them in wed like the way it textures the block structures(Maybe after some conversion of mdl files to wmp files)? or do we have to unwrap uvw in 3ds max for texturing (as we are doing now)?

Thank you very much!

I do everything to do with modelling or texturing in 3DS MAX. Use either the UVW MAP or UNWRAP UVW modifier as it has much more flexibility than MED.

If you're exporting models as .3ds make sure your texture names do not have more than 8 characters (3ds format standard) or else 3DS MAX will truncate them and then the textures wont work.

Just make sure when you go into MED that your textures are in the same directory as the model your importing. Then simply save as MDL5/MDL7 and then you can use it in WED.

Also BMP, PCX and TGA are the formats to make textures in. For some reason (i dont know) WED doesn't display models with textures in .png,.jpg or .gif format.
I wish .png was supported - the filesize is so small. Maybe i'm wrong, hehe.

DJB MASTER

It is nice to meet some who does all the modeling in 3ds max. I would like to ask you couple more questions if I may

1.
Here is the screenshots of the 2 sample models that i have created. After defining the polygons for the places of the windows (the places are of same width and height) and the door. I have removed some edges that i thought was unnecessary, to decrease the poly count.
in the second case i have added some new edges, to get rid of some sharp triangles that occur after deleting the edges.
is it wrong for me to delete the edges, and is it beneficial to make some triangulation to get rid of those sharp triangles that would occur otherwise?


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2.
My another problem is the shading issue that i described in this another topic:
http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/796860/an/0/page/0#Post796860

have you experienced anything like this in your models. How do you get around this problem. Do you close your meshes after importing to med or not:

3. uvw unwrapping question
As the houses that i am modeling have many repeating textures, when I unwrap the uvw's, I tend to overlap the coordinates to be able to use the same texture in different places of the house. For example in this case, the windows are of the same dimensions so i will be placing them over each other as they will be using the same texture. Do you work the same way? Is it wrong to overlap the uv coordiantes? Are there any drawbacks to this method?

Thanks for your reply.

In most cases it is absolutely ok to overlap uvws, but one execption came in my mind:
If you want to do the lighting of your level in Max, with GI and all that fancy stuff, and then render to texture, overlapping is not allowed.
But this workflow is pretty high-end, I dont think you want to use it.

nope, All I want to do is get my models into wed, correctly SO It is perfectly normal and acceptable to overlap uv's? Thats nice to know.. at least I am doing one thing right!