help with importing a ship

[Beldamen]

Hey everyone, i've been a long time fan of BC, loving the wealth of ships and mods around!!

Because of the lockdown, i've decided to give 3d modelling a go, with a view to importing a ship into BC to play with.

I've done some of the hard work, created the ship itself in 3dsmax, file below, and barring a few finishing touches with textures and a couple of other things, i'm about finished.

My question is: what do i need to do to get the model ready to import into BC.
I know i need to create hardpoints and the like, but what do i use to do so?
how do i convert to the correct format (which is?)

any help and advice would be greatly appreciated!!
any help would be greatly appreciated!

[KrrKs]

You best download the BC SDK (needed later).

The ship's modelfile for Bridge commander needs to be a.Nif format. There exists an (obscure by now) plugin for a (I don't know which one) 3dsmax version which can export it as required. Maybe someone else can help you with that and state the required plugin or version.

I know that there was also an export plugin for Milkshape, that seemed to work *reasonably* well.


For bringing the ship into BC:

The hardpoint can best be created/edited with the ModelPropertyEditor from the SDK. There is short tutorial/readmy included with that as well. I'd advice to take a somewhat similar sized/equipped ship's HP as template, and alter that.

You'd also need a ship file that states the path to the model, to the hardpoint, and stuff like damage resolution or so. You can basically copy any existing one and alter the stuff you'd need for your ship.

Then you need to create a plugin file. Those can be created with BCUT. Just point it to the shipfile created above and the tool does the rest.

[Beldamen]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, i've been tinkering with the model, i think it's looking pretty much done, but i have another issue.
i've got the scripts done, which is all good, but every time i try to load the ship in quick battle it crashes the game.
i've replaced the model with a different ship model, and it loads fine, but my model seems to kill everything.

There aren't any errors that come up when importing the model into nifskope, and no errors when saving and opening it as a nif, which is confusing.
Also, i've not got any textures coming through into Nifskope, which is frustrating!

Any ideas anyone?

[Beldamen]

i've also tried just creating a basic shape, saving as a nif, renaming and using that as the ship model, as well as replacing a working ship with my model, same thing.
it's getting frustrating now, lol.

[KrrKs]

Purely from Memory:

BC is fine with high poly ships (speaking from a 2004 pov), so anything up to 30K or 50K polygons should work ok. What BC does not cope well with are large textures, i.e., multiple 2k or 4k textures on a single model, or multiple ships with large textures at once.

I also vaguely remember that the mesh needs to 'unified'. A single mesh with all surface normals pointing 'outwards' (Not sure I understood, remembered and stated that correctly here).
But that may have also been ST:Armada...
When you say the crash happens with simple shapes thisis probably not the cause.

There is a BCC discord that is slightly more active than this forum. Maybe someone there can help you with this:
https://discord.gg/QzDGJXX