posted 05-17- 02:09 PM               

It's probably something really easy, but it's driving me mad.

Wht do I want this? I WANT AN me262B 2 seater night fighter and all I need now is a canopy.

posted 05-17- 05:41 PM               

------------------

Sleek design, thats all I care about.

posted 05-17- 06:14 PM               

I always start with an existing canopy, not from scratch. Use extractor to break the 262 down into .lods, and open the canopy .lod in AC3D.

The first thing to do is determine what "color" the glass is using. At the right end of the color bar are the colors that got "imported" with the part. Find the one that matches the color of the glass, and check the transparency value. It should be a low number, less than 0.5. Write that number down somewhere--you might need it again.

Next, use CTL-SHF-mouseclick on the 3D view window, and, in vertex mode, click on each glass surface until all the glass is selected. Set all these surfaces to one-sided. You should rotate the view, and you should only be able to see the canopy glass from the outside.

NOW, you're actually ready to work on the canopy. You can copy and paste, duplicate, stretch, whatever, to mold the old canopy into a new one. When you're done, select all the objects, "merge" them into one object, "optimize vertices," and "smooth" the object. Then export it as the original .lod, and rebuild the model with builder.

Now, beware that there are probably THREE canopy .lods. One is for the cockpit view. I usually remove the glass from this one and delete it, unless it has reflections built in. At any rate, the canopy frame for this .lod should be one-sided, with the INside visible. The second .lod is the "main" .lod, and should be one-sided, visible only from the OUTside. Third .lod is the "distant" .lod, visible from outside only, and colored so as to be visible at a distance. The switchin distances for the .lods should be something like 9 for .lod 1, 100000 for .lod 2, and 2000000 for .lod 3. Easiest to set those in OPS, but can also be done in AC3D.

The biggest mistake I make is to forget to set the glass to one-sided when I first open the .lod in AC3D. For some reason AC3D screws up and sets surfaces to two-sided by default. This will give you too much tint, and cost frame rate as well.

The second major mistake is not lining up the glass on two .lods exactly. The canopy .lods should occupy exactly the same space, or you have a good chance of causing a CTD.

Another thing to watch out for is a "composite" glass part. This is a part that appears to be just made of glass, but has a second material "grafted" into it as part of the canopy frame. Every time I've tried to modify the area with the "grafted" material, the model CTDs. Now I either cut away that section and delete it, or leave it alone and modify another section of the canopy.

If you're comfortable with OPS, I think it's a good idea to make the canopy frame a separate object from the glass, with the glass as a "child" of the frame. That way, you can always delete the glass from the model, get everything else working, opening, whatever, and then tinker with the glass itself later if it gives you problems.

Now, if you don't use AC3D or OPS, um...never mind

posted 05-17- 09:30 PM            

The defaulting to 2 sided polys bug in AC3D is fixed in the latest set of plugins at my
web site. (I hope )
Polys should now stay as they are or how you set them.

posted 05-18- 04:03 AM               

I DONT USE AC3D, though after this, I may just spend sone money...gulp

I have found some textures in common\textiures called Transparent and TransGrad. Tried to attach these textures to LOD's through extractor / Builder, but when I open the result in OPS it came out a lovely shade of bright red!

The setup I'm using involves using an old Quake modeller which I am fairly well used to using, then using MDL2FSD, FSD2LOD and LOD2 to generate an .OBJ file to import into OPS.
When exporting from OPS, I use Crossroads to convert the .OBJ into a DXF or 3DS file that my Quake modeller can use. Trouble is, the texture/materials that were present in the LOD don't seem to survive the process.