Mmkay, about modeling buildings in MED, or in particular, modeling buildings in MED after transfering them in from WED.

In wed I built a simple 'house'-type structure, hollowed it out (no doors or windows for the sake of testing) and brought it into MED.

Now, please see the below PIC. first I must apologize for the lackadaisical skin I put on the roof (and the lack of skin anywhere else) but I literally made it in 3 mins in photoshop, and the skin was way too small to begin with (got stretched out a lot).

The problem I have is that MED doesn't seem to interpret the geometry perfectly... see those faces that are inexplicably missing, painted GREY or are just completely see-thru?



Any one have a clue how to avoid this.. Maybe I didn't give enough thickness to my rooftop area? perhaps the method I used is flawed and in the future when I try to create stuff in WED for export to MED, I should be extremely careful and use simple geometry??

Although I don't know the trick behind using WED for the basic shapes, what I tend to do is place a mess of vertices off the side then move them around to form the basic shape, performing lots of rather simple calculations for maximum accuracy along the way.

I think the cause to the gap is that the vertex in the close center top area isn't joined up properly. A quick fix is moving the vertex. As to the texture stretching, this might be from in WED or the conversion to MED. Open the skin edittor and move the vertices to adjust this. Want me to build a quick sample of a similar shape?

No thanks, but I appreciate all the help until now. I was able to figure out how to make a better, less-streched out texture. I'm using a 512x512 skin instead of 256x256 (should I go for 1024x1024?) and am trying my best to put in as much detail as possible.

Oh, I also restarted by creating a new building in WED, with thicker walls and geometry in general, and it seems MED is taking it better. Still looking for tips on this though.

Stay tuned Ulillillia and others, I'll post my results here when / if I'm proud of them

Texture size will affect how pixelated things will look. A larger texture size has a better texture resolution. 256x256 textures are the fastest. See this image once and you'll see the effect. On the left side is a 30x30 texture slapped onto a 64x64-quant space. On the right side is a 256x256 texture on the same 64x64-quant space. Even from just a short distance, it's hard to see pixelation. This screenshot is very old, considerably close to a year old. At that time, I didn't know how to texture things anywhere near as decent as I can now, hence the floor with little detail. This was my experimental level, a level designed only for experimenting.

Avoid using textures above 1024x1024 for compatibility reasons. Most cards on systems 4 years old can handle that. Always use the smallest texture size you can with the least amount of loss. Going anything finer than a 0.25 scale is not necessary and only becomes readily visible with a very small clip_near value (like 4 and under) and with a high resolution (like 1600x1200).

I am actually quite familiar with these concepts - I have an ACS in Digital Multimedia... Unfortunately this never made me a good modeler.

Other than that I have a good background in level design... I've designed levels as far back as the original Doom, and subsequently quake, counterstrike and doom 3.

At any rate, A6 is a different ballpark and for the type of project I want to move forward with, I need to have a world fully implemented with models and no BSP-based geometry at all. This sort of throws anything I know about level design (other than theory and basic concepts) out the window, since all editors I've worked with in the past (a4 included) had a similar setup.

So for now I'll be working with MED until someone chimes in with some suggestions on what 3rd party software I should consider using. Whatever I'm learning now will benefit me either way (helps to know MED).

That's just what I'm doing - levels without any BSP geometry, except a single block that is very small (8x8x8) with a sky texture to get skies to work. Blocks can't get as big as my levels are, but with other tricks I have, who really cares? Everything is based on using nothing but models because of their extreme rendering speed. I have a level that is almost entirely BSP and it barely manages to get 5 fps with the whole level in the view and that's with simple shapes and snap being used. My latest model-only level, in theory, with even 50 times the detail the BSP level can run in excess of 60 fps and that's without LOD implemented (using my much more flexible LOD system). It could be over 100 fps with LOD.

Others often refer to 3DS Max as "professional". There's Wings 3D, Blender, and Milkshape to name a few others. Still, you'll have to do a format conversion, of which I don't know much about.

Awesome, thanks

Will definitely take the time out to check those programs. For the moment I want to get more familiar with MED but I will need to learn a 3rd party modeling program sooner rather than later.

You do not *need* to learn a third party modelling program. In fact, it's optional. You may if you want, but you could use MED for 5 years and still not want to learn such a third party program.

Alright I thought I'd post the end-result of my efforts, modelling strictly in MED (without even building the geometry in WED first). I built this vertex-by-vertex.