Model orientation

What program are you using? If XSI, then make sure your model and rootpoint null are facing the same direction and you must freeze the rotational history of your model to get it to face the right direction.
hope this helps!

Ezraeil

I don't really know what you mean by that...

All you have to do is rotate your model in the right direction and freeze rotation history. Just do that until the model is pointed where you want it.

this is extremely important!

In whatever program you are exporting from into XSI you have to remove all transform modification information. In 3d studio max this is 'Reset Xforms' in the tools menu you want the ship facing right in a left viewport in max (other formats may be different based on the export type, right handed vs left handed) in XSI when you export you want to select the ship mesh or other meshes (NOT NULLS) and then do FREEZE ALL TRANSFORMS

the reason this is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY is that the model has a transform matrice that is wrapped around it, that way the mesh information does not need to be recomputed when you scale or rotate or move (it acts like an offset) EACH 3D package does this differently so when you convert between them you may actually have a model that is facing left, but its transform matrice is facing right! so whatever you can do to reset the matrice to the current alignment in all programs is necessary to get correct facing

This is about model orientation. I was explaining how to correct a models orientation in XSI. I would think that if they know their model flys sideways or pointing upward. They have already gotten to the merge and freeze steps in XSI. As far as the tranform matrice I have no idea what you're talking about. I can resize move or rotate my models in XSI and then just freeze and export. I have no problems with getting models in game.

Instead of people blurbing out a part here and a part there about modeling. Why doesn't someone do a XSI tutorial and someone else do Max tutorial. There's a lot of information between you super modelers, like making the correct textures and how to do them in XSI, Max ect ect. So that us amature modelers can actually learn a thing or two and stop asking 10000000 questions that are answered multiple times in 1000000000 threads. Me, I stumble through it and figure it out on my own I will work hours on figuring out a problem (such as rotation).

Anyway, just an idea.

the really frustrating part about the transform matrice problem is that a ship will say it is -90 rotated when imported but not be actually visually rotated until you freeze all transforms. But what's even more frustrating is that if the model is transformed before importing without being reset and then rotated in XSI it will be rotated even if you think it looks good in XSI and freez transforms. I spent a few days trying to figure out why a ship that was imported, looking fine in XSI and had freeze transforms was still pointing straight down. It was because XSI freezes its transforms, but doesn't cascade them down to the model, the coordinates get rotated on export (found this out by exporting the XSI and then reimporting the XSI into the same scene, the nulls came in properly and the mesh was pointing the wrong way!) so if you are working just in XSI you just need to freeze transforms, if you are importing from another format you need to make sure the same thing is done before it exports.

I am working on a max tutorial, but it takes time to make these things and I am more interested in getting my ships in

Dunno, why they decided to make the models that way. I had to learn by doing... Starting SoaSE multiple times gets to be a big pain.

So what I do now is the models I have in game I use as a reference to start building more. This why I don't have to worry aboutt he rotation thing.

My main problem is, I have no earthly idea how to do the textures. Much less make a map, well making the map is easy, getting it sorted is a whole different ball of wax. But, I have no idea how to generate the three different maps.

Hey i got the hand of it. Thanks y'all