I made some adjustments to the tutorial. It now contains steps to add transparent cockpits and how to give the ships the appropriate colors. If you have any questions about, or find any errors in the tutorial, please let me know.
Perhaps someone can help me here. FLStat, as I understand it, now keeps track of rankings/stats on a server. I've included the link that I downloaded FL-Stat 1.5 from, hopefully you can tell me what's up.
Please note, there are two tools called FL-Stat. Confusing.
EDIT:
It is nearly impossible to find a copy of CMP Importer/exporter that works with the new Milkshape that I've downloaded and after finally searching it out, I wanted to share the location to make things easier for future artists:
1. Any moderator or admin, please move into developer forum and pin it there.
2. A reminder: Rights for the custom models belong to the model creator. Changing skin, shape and/or use it in any kind of work not related to Discovery Freelancer mod needs permission by the model creator and Igiss as mod creator.
3. Have fun with creating nice renders for Discovery.
Okay, I'm having some problems. I can easily follow the tutorial up to importing it into 3DS. Well, even that works, but some of the textures are... blank? I'm not sure how to say it exactly. I'm importing a Barghest and when I do, SOME of the textures (p_fighter01.TGA, p_fighter02.TGA, p_fighter03.TGA) come up as blank (grey texture ball). I can open them in Photoshop and see that they are certainly not blank, but the are not imported properly. I am able to drag and drop the TGA files directly onto the model in 3DS and they are applied to the part of the ship that I drop them on, but after fiddling with this, the program crashes.
Anyone have an idea as to what I'm doing wrong here? I'm using Milkshape version 1.8.4, 3DS version 2010. I do notice one thing, when I export for 3DS, it saves as a .3dS file (As suggested), but when I attempt to open a file in 3DS, it calls for a .MAX file. I can select "view all" and import the .3DS and it won't complain, but this MAY be connected to my texture issues.
I am going to go look for a new export plug for Milkshape now. I will report if I manage.
Well, I've managed to keep the program from crashing til' finish by way of saving progressively. It worked, but it was... inelegant to say the least. Being as I am not at all experienced in 3D Modeling, perhaps this is to be expected, but if anyone has an idea as to what I did incorrectly, I'd be happy to hear it.
Okay, even MORE fun. The preview screen is all fine and dandy, all the textures are in place (dragged and dropped as previously mentioned). Now, when I try to render it, SOME of the textures don't show up, and some do. But here's where it gets good. If I change nothing, but render again? It chooses DIFFERENT textures to render! This time, different textures are in place and ones that rendered before come up blank. This is... subpar. Moreover, this is frustrating. I'm contemplating just using Adobe Illustrator to make a vector version of the ship I want, but that would take longer than this SHOULD have.
*sigh* this is why I'm not a 3D modeler.
EDIT:
I got it, the render part. I had to open up the Texture explorer, select the part of the model to color with the eye dropper and drag the correct texture from the explorer over. I couldn't tell you why the correct textures are in the explorer but are not applied by default to the model, they just are. Maybe because I drag/applied earlier. I don't know, this crap is hard.
I don't think i can help you ryeguy146, since i have almost no knowledge of the programs (i just happened to get it to work like this). Since you are using a different version of milkshape, a different version of the cmp importer and a different version of 3ds max, it could be possible that it just doesn't work the same as it did for me.
However, the 3ds file should be "imported" not "opened". That could have a different result. Also i had to give the textures a 8-character name. Models in a .3ds format contain "links" to the texturefiles. Somehow milkshape or the 3ds exporter from milkshape, limit the name for these links to 8 characters. So if you export a model that has a link to a texture called "p_fighter01.TGA", the .3ds file will have it linked to "p_fighte.TGA" Since there is no texture with that name, it will end up blanc.
If you plan to render more ships, or several ships in the same scene, i advise to give it a completely unique name. The easiest would be something like "001pf1.tga" (instead of "p_fighter01.TGA"). The 001 refers to the ship, so the second ship, would get 002, etc., while "pf1" is short for p_fighter01.
I believe i put this part of renaming into the tutorial. So if you actually did rename it, then it's probably the different versions of the programs to blame.
![[Image: recoil-1.png]](http://i734.photobucket.com/albums/ww343/Recoil9000/Sigs/recoil-1.png)
![[Image: SethSig.png]](http://i130.photobucket.com/albums/p272/Sedrander/SethSig.png)
