Modding 101

from Sins Forums
Ok so me and my friend are modeling a ship that will be replacing the stupid looking Revelation class ship... the ship will be dubbed the Archon Class Dreadnaught.

In our Mod/Campaign we are allowing the novalith to fire at structures and or buildings as well as the vasari orbital gun. PROBLEM IS this is a huge disadvantage for the advent. They need something to compensate for this raw power... Hence the Archon.

The Archon will feature all the firepower of the Revelation including a weapon technology "recovered" from new converts that joined the Advent that use to serve the TEC. The result is a massive planet/structure/ship killing weapon fitted onto the Archon. It has similar cooldown to the novalith. BUT with the differences in technology the cannon isnt as strong per power generator.... instead of 50,000 it will be like.. 30,000 all depending...

Now we need help with design our ships and indicating hardpoints, exporting and what not. Once we know how to do that... the model we are working on will work nicely into our campaign. IF ANYONE would mind sending a tutorial or just aiming us and teaching us how... we would be sooo grateful.

Aim : ironnaleman

email: [email protected]
modding
5,394 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Now we need help with design our ships and indicating hardpoints, exporting and what not. Once we know how to do that... the model we are working on will work nicely into our campaign. IF ANYONE would mind sending a tutorial or just aiming us and teaching us how... we would be sooo grateful.
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This is covered in the PDFs provided by Ironclad and available from the download section :P
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
Helpful links:

If you use 3dmax which I use for modeling and i'm very new at it too just started at my friends house like about 2 weeks ago.
The links I found useful are:
WWW Link
A script to help convert the meshes from soase to 3dsmax and back.

WWW Link
Use this link to get the 1.1 version instead of the 2.0. The 2.0 is too unstable.

WWW Link
For weapon hardpoints.

When I use 3ds max I first run the script the 1.1 verison.
Then I import a mesh located in my SOSAE directory and it loads up.
I select the schemetic Tool to select all the dummy objects (exhust,weapons,center,aura,ability hardpoints) and connect them to the mesh.
Then I do my normal tweaking to get use to the modeling program.
Once your done go to the materials section and make sure you have three types of maps. One diffuse which is called CL, The Specular level which is called the DA map, and the bump map which is called the NM.Make sure all these are mapped into one ball cause I used to put one map for each ball and it didnt work. Instead the object came out black or crashed the game. When you put the textures on make sure put the file texture name with the .dds on the end of it.
Once this is all done unselect the model and the hardpoints and reselect the model.
Go back to the SOASE script menu and select export.
Hopefully this helps.:)

Oh im in process of making a mod, so if you two wanna join in on the fun I could always use the extra hands.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
is there a plugin for Maya? That's what I use. I'm aware I could save out as an obj and import to max and then convert over to the sao files but is there an easier way?