posted 07-02- 04:39 AM               

BUT, I have some problems.

1) With AC3D 2.5 latest Beta, Latest Hippie plug-ins and OPS 1.3 with Lodfix, i still cannot seem to get Lods to work for me.

If I export them from OPS, AC3D crashes when I import them.

If I build them in AC3D and export them as Lods, OPS imports them as 'swiss cheese'

If I use extractor / builder, the same lod seems to work fine.

I don't know enough about the setup yet to work out which part of the setup is the problem.

I've mailed the developer about the AC3D crash, and hope to get some pointers there, but I wonde if that is where the problem actually lies.

I know this set up should work, and look forward to getting it working.

HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP....

posted 07-03- 03:54 PM               

What confuses me is that I don't seem to be able to export anything from OPS and import it into AC3D without AC3D crashing.

I never had problems with .OBJ files, but AC3D doesn't support them.

Have resorted to exporting and converting via Crossroads, but I registered AC3 to get away from converting formats all the time. I was getting all sorts of problems as a result.

AC3D has some very powerful modelling functions and I intend to persevere, but this is proving to be difficult.

posted 07-03- 06:45 PM            

There is not much point hassling Andy about problems with 3rd party plugins .

The .LOD import/export code hasn't been changed for quite a while and I haven't heard of any problems with it from the people that are using it heavily for a long time now.

The things I can think of that could cause an AC3D exception are:

o a bad LOD file (this is the most likely)
o polygons with too many vertices
o too many polygons
o too many vertices.

limits are

20 vertices per polygon
4000 polygons per LOD
12000 vertices per LOD

There is also a potential naming confusion problem here also, the LOD format refered to
in 3D conversion packages and the like is
a special VRML level of detail format, it
is NOT the .LOD format used by bulder/extractor/sdm/olc. The .LOD files
I use are just a ASCII version of the binary
3D mesh format in the .SM files. .LOD is not
any kind of 3D file standard it is just
something I made up.

posted 07-16- 04:04 PM               

I'm just getting back into OP and so now, even your Extractor and Extractor II progs are obsolete? You are saying going with the newest OL program on your site is the way to go now? Cool.

I just did a test with the Ju88 and it imported into AC3D beautifully. You are a master, I have no clue how you figured all this stuff out. What I really like best is the ability to mess with shadows finally.

posted 07-16- 07:08 PM            

you should stop using extractor/builder,
there was a product recall notice put out a while ago
Seriously, builder contains some very nasy
bugs that can corrupt files under some circumstances. smd and olc have had these
bugs fixed.

Pete,
you most likely have more than 2 LODs
selected, swap only works with 2 LODs
selected, you probably got some of the overlaping lower detail LODs selected at
the same time.

Hippie.