Lucky_Strike

LOL There's even a whole Wikipedia page devoted to 'We don't need no stinkin' badges'

Me - if you have a spare one you are trying to get shot of, I'll gladly take it off your hands

LOL, it's been a long day! Have a beer and relax! I managed to get 3rd party objects working inside a building as well, used the same technique of parenting to one of the main object's sub-meshes. Here's a YT video of the results with three objects added to the building200 barn ... I think it's time I went back to some proper mods ...

Oh yes. Re your Church - I found the bench after importing your mdr ... Moved it back to position and exported fine, but bombed my RT twice in a row when trying to view in 3D map in editor ... Was going to try and redo but I couldn't find a building304.mdr that looked like yours, all mine were bigger in RT, and it's not a model in FB or BN?

Yeah I think the additional graphics may cause a bit of glitching. Overall I think this method would only be useful if we can get the menchen interacting with the meshes, moving round rather than through stuff The import/export routine is definitely not finished, as you say he was still working on it and knew that the metadata side of things needed resolution. Frustratingly he mentioned the metadata for alpha channels in his thread, with a link through to an image but that's long gone, so I can't see what he was talking about. It's certainly a lot easier going this route, for now I would recommend this. I have another idea or two to try with added building features, but they are quite low priority for now. Will do ...

I see updates on his YouTube channel occasionally so I think he's just moved on to other projects. Yes the manual is actually okay once one gets to grips with the language. I did notice in rereading sbobovyc's original thread that he said it's perfectly possible to work in a different 3D app then export the model back to Blender as an obj file to then export back to mdr. This might actually help with stuff like UV mapping when it gets too complex to understand in Blender. There are some bespoke UV mapping apps that look like they offer better interfaces, but most are pay-for often by subscriptions, so not likely to be worth it for most of us amateurs. I did find another app, FreeCAD, or something like that, which was quite useful for cracking certain 3D files that Blender doesn't open. Now when I open newer Blenders I get spooked by their modern looking GUI and have no idea where to start, it's like learning another app all over again!

Absolutely. Though one big gotcha with Blender seems to be that if one opens a file made by someone else it also opens into their choice of GUI layout. I really don't get this, seems like the GUI preferences are embedded in the file, which might be alright when opening one's own files say between different work stations, but I really hate having to reconfigure my viewport just so that I can mess about with a model. This makes for very annoying user experience. I guess there may be a way around this with preferences or setting up a default user interface but boy do they make this stuff so confoundedly difficult

Hatches, hatches ... hehe Hmm, where do you find the movement for hatches? I thought it might be an action spot but couldn't find one on the Panzer IV which I was modding to a static bunker. The commander's hatch (they all do in fact) did some strange acrobatics even though I never touched it. I found out it was swinging off at 180º and disappearing several metres below the model, under ground! By trial and error I got it moving in a better direction so it, at least, remains attached to the cupola albeit on the side rather than in its original position on the back.

Oh yes, the best thing is to specifically search for Blender and 2.79 videos in YouTube. If the video is more recent than about 2019/2020 it's probably going to be no good to you. If I can find him there's a guy who has done masses of stuff with a channel going back quite a few years, his stuff is usually easy to follow and useful. What's frustrating is that our leading light @sbobovyc was working on an addon version for Blender 2.8x which he didn't have time to finish. Also you can bet the guys at BF don't have to jump through these hoops just to export a model ... hohum

Nigel, it only gets worse when you start looking at stuff like UV maps which just frazzle the brain sometimes. BUT I'm so glad to see another willing to have a go at this stuff, when you get it right, and you will, the delight of seeing something new in game is worth the struggle. As you're finding things like rotation and scaling can play havoc with what looks like a perfectly good model. One thing that really helps in this respect: Once you are happy with the model and its placement relative to its origin then you select the whole model in object mode and go to the object menu > apply > scale and rotation; also apply location; you may see a little pop up palette appear in the tools pane which allows you to do all three at once. Doesn't do any harm to use the apply thing several times just to be certain. What this is doing roughly is applying all the transformations (rotation scale etc) to the object relative to its original size, location etc AND transforming that to the new origin X, Y, Z = 0, 0, 0. It's kinda nailing down all the stuff you've done. I always do these steps when ready to export though on occasion the scale one can cause other problems. Baby steps ... we are all toddlers when it comes to Blender!

There's so much good stuff that needs to be absorbed. Yes if my test on the Opel Blitz Barn are anything to go by I suspect the ruin object will disappear with the building and leave us with just the collapsed rubble and ruin. Which would be okay for game play. Your grid would no doubt be useful in this.

I don't fully understand what is happening here as I'm so unfamiliar with the way of the buildings Jedi. Whenever I mess with buildings to check out how something works it's invariably an independent building. However, I do appreciate your continued efforts to make your vision work and have a way for even the most inexperienced of us to partake in the goodness. When I finally have time I will have to study the bricks and mortar more carefully. Thanks Nigel. Now I go fix tram carriages ...

My vote is for historically and geographically correct as possible within the constraints of the game. You'll have to produce an instruction manual addendum for how to create and manage steep terrain in CM.

So you might like this: Who left that in here?! ... and where'd these barrels come from? Even goes transparent like buildings ... Fully destructible - vaporised! by some Russian 75mm HE To get the Opel Blitz and barrels to appear I reparented them to a sub-object rather than the main object. So for the barn (indie building 200) the main object is called level 0, with sub-objects named roof, wall-front-level 0, wall-left-level 0, wall-right-level 0 and wall-rear-level 0. The OB is parented to the front, the barrels to rear and left. They are still at the floor level rather than the ground underneath, so they sit correctly in the building. The building seems to behave as normal - clicks with modifiers do what they should to the textures and degree of damage; snow appears on the roof and snow winter textures appear for the walls when snow is laying round about. The walls also react to their locale, so the barn changed from wood to stone for Germany '45. Notice stone winter texture and damaged structure - missing door - who left those barrels there? Now the caveats that I observed. The pixeltruppen could care less about the extras, they just walk right through them. The truck doesn't change camo to whitewashed even though others on the map do. The tyres do adopt a snowy tread though - go figure! As shown, they are a bit too destructible. Also if a single wall, to which the object is parented, is clicked to fully destroyed then the object disappears as well. And if viewing the building and looking through a wall which disappears from sight to allow a clear view, objects attached to the disappeared wall also vanish from sight. I'll put the mdr here on Dropbox for any intrepid investigators or if you just fancy a garage to park your OB in. No other special textures are required.

Thanks. That one is based on a Scot's pine, but it plays havoc with frame rates at the moment. I need to look at the top again to get it under control. I have a big Spruce that I made with quite dense lower branches touching the ground almost, that was before I had a better understanding of the meshes so I need to rebuild that one as well: Nice for mountains ... All coming sometime ...

Absolutely agree. Haha do like to see the poor pixeltruppen climbing the stairs. It's obviously been carefully modelled as sometimes they even seem to turn corners on the stairs! I wonder if the stairs are always in the same place in a building? Perhaps they did intend to have stairs when originally programming the game, but somehow couldn't make them work or just couldn't be a*sed in the end.

You're a hard task master ... I'll get right on it Guv' Not that I'm planning to make any of these, but this is all good info thanks. If we had an invisible, whole, small one or two level house inside a flavor wrecked house, but left the destroyed house model alone, the when the flavor object (the toughest we could choose probably) is destroyed by HE it would hopefully coincide with the house being destroyed, then we would be left with the same pile of ruins as we have now in game, the odd collapsed thing that you describe. It would obviously be a bit of a chance affair since the timing of either the invisible house or invisible flavor getting destroyed coincidentally are not predictable, but overall it would probably achieve something useable. A lot of test firing is probably needed to see what the odds and behaviour are like. Yes placing on level ground or creating terraces would be best for anything more sloped than a few degrees from horizontal. Don't want no Crooked Houses!

Yes, that'll save you some work! The volume of these does really add to the believability, that's what is so appealing.

Oh okay, that make sense, thanks. So a 1 level building with no roof, and walls wrapped in the ruins flavor object will then potentially keep the pixeltruppen at ground level so they don't climb their imaginary stair to their imaginary floors above - just say no boys! This could then be expanded with taller flavour objects to create those shell like buildings, obviously making the models and placing them in the editor would be loads of work. Look great though.

Thanks Harry. Your mention of LOD issues made me look again at what I'd seen before. As you say it may well be a price worth paying for some improvements in performance on tree heavy maps. I suspect that BF have investigated this themselves. I'm going to experiment with one tree style - tree 5 since it's so important at the moment - to see what I can do with poster styles and the various LODs. I already have a system for making the individual billboards, and I seem to recall that I found a Blender addon or tutorial for creating these poster LODs, but dismissed it because they were too complex for our LOD 4 models, but maybe they're useful after all ... I know , in my dreams ... but absolutely yes I think ReShade could well help in this respect. The same depth map that aids with stuff like DoF could be used for mapping colours in some way. I must get that explanation of depth maps sorted. it was too quiet here ...

Yes I remember that. This happens as an error quite a lot. What I see in Blender is an empty material slot, but this is how it is when the mdr is imported so there's something else (metadata) which governs this. If only BF would release an official plugin we would be saved from all this nonsense and time wasting. Guess it's just not important enough when you've got a busy schedule of new releases to manage (cough, cough, How hot ... cough, top poster in thread). Well it actually worked okay when I didn't have the 3rd party model inside. Seemed perfectly normal and the pixeltruppen were happy enough to do their usual. Everything in the editor worked as expected. The only thing I couldn't do was get the furniture to appear. Interestingly, once Blender knew about the placeholder textures it seemed to remember for a subsequent new import of the same building model, so it linked to the textures without me telling it about the removal of the (00) suffix. Yes that's a god idea. I'll open one of those up. Want to do some other experiments with them at some point anyway so good to familiarise myself with them. But yes the parent/child mesh thing is generally very useful and not fussy about the names for the child meshes so long as the parent mesh is left alone. I have used it for all sorts of cheats in other models, but buildings are, I suppose, more complex. Yes I think there's probably loads we can do, it's a matter of time. Just being able to import, edit, and save without futzing up the model is a start. It may just be something very simple like how the interior objects are placed. I noticed the floors are always above the ground mesh so it could somehow relate to that. I was careful to put the objects on the floor, but perhaps they needed to be on the ground. Alternatively it could be that the model naming needed to be edited to somehow match the expected building names, there are a couple of textures with versions a and b so perhaps there is scope there to add further sequentially named textures. Just needs more xperiments, it's exhausting though, when it fails.

Ohh yes! As Churchie mighty say ... The ruins are looking well cool now. Out of interest, cos I haven't had time to play with them myself, do they have upper floors for use by pixeltruppen or do they just use the ground level. One of the things that I noticed about damaged buildings in your Berlin mod was that despite being apparently empty, floorless shells the pixeltruppen would still occupy upper floors of ruined buildings. Was that just a limitation of the game mechanics? If this new mod does potentially limit movement and positioning to just ground floor it would give a good range of possible structure types. Always useful to keep an eye on Blender's built in consol/info panel, it will always show what's happened with commands issued., though some of the output can be obscure. Sometimes an export failure is only partial, you might get an mdr but it won't necessarily be complete, a clue to this is the file size. One can usually gauge if a file is complete if the file size is what is expected, most models we make are the equivalent of or larger than the originals, so if an edited file shrinks substantially there may be an issue. Eeek! I still have forests to build! So far as I could see in the independent buildings damage is just done with textures. There are obviously some engine mechanics - dice throw calculations etc - related to the status of a building but the damage we see is just visuals. The collapsed buildings though must come from something else. You all know more about this than me.

Yes there's a real need to do something like this, sadly colours at distance are not properly corrected in game, what I'd like to see is a proper darkening/shifting of the colours and under-shadows for all seasons, weather etc. How it looks in game now: (an artists impression ) an improvement IMO: Maybe something like this could be achieved by lowering the distant LOD 4 models and adding artificial shadow to the bottom of the textures, sort of similar to what you're already doing by darkening the texture. Also, technically there's nothing to stop us using the billboard LODs as nearer LODs. The only caveat is that LOD 3 (at least I think it's LOD 3 from memory) is used as the stick trees when trees are toggled. The billboard LODs just disappear, but that's probably resolvable. The game already renders LOD 4 quite close when struggling even with balanced graphics settings ... ... they kick in at about 40-50m here. If also using LOD 4 as LOD 3 the effect is very similar ... ... the original BF LOD 4 as LOD 3 on the right. One big issue that might be a deal breaker is the overhead view - it ain't pretty ... But these are original BF LOD 4 as LOD 3 - it might well be possible to improve the models. LOD 4 uses a 1-bit, jaggy alpha channel and only sixteen faces, they are very low res. Whereas LOD 3 uses softer 8-bit greyscale alpha channels and could potentially have many more faces since they are 3D at present ... it's a thought. With LOD 4 as LOD 3 AND LOD 2 we can almost walk right up to the LOD model in game ... ... here tree 5, LOD 4 (original BF model and texture) next to tree 8 (my own model/texture) in game. Of course a plus is the massive increase in render speed ... might actually be an aid to map and scenario makers. You are probably at the limits of the game engine, about to stray in to the Twilight Zone ... Very odd ... not Maiden of course, gotta love em, though I must admit I still prefer Paul Di'Anno on lead vocals ... WHY are you all running towards that machine gun nest when I ordered you to run away!

Famous last words and all that. So first tried a random object gathered off the interweb. Typically this cuckoo seemed to hamper export even with everything I could think of corrected. Also, as an aside, weird issue with the independent buildings - when I import an independent building mdr into Blender none of the textures were linked despite all being there and in same folder as per SOP (happened on two different buildings - so by the rules of slack scientific proof - they'll all be the same). Exporting without textures is a big zero. Connected the textures to their various building materials parts; all good in Blender; exported without metadata 'cos of the cuckoo inside; in game whole building appears as a black void. This tells me textures are not linking despite being there in Blender. I note that independent buildings have strange naming of textures eg building200-floor (00).bmp, building200-floor (01).bmp presumably the (00) and (01) suffix representing the texture variations. So me thinks take off the (00) suffix from the texture names, thus the name for a texture is for example building200-floor.bmp; link those to the texture slots in Blender. All still looks okay in Blender, but export still has to be without metadata 'cos of cuckoo. This time the building appears correctly in game, with all originally named (00), (01) suffixed, installed, click-change textures working etc, but no cuckoo inside, nada. So, try again this time with newly selected objects from game - 1. Opel Blitz, 2. the three wine barrel flavor objects. All parented to a big one storey barn independent building 200. Place objects to block easy movement and block the small door. Again textures for the building need the (00) suffix removal change but otherwise they showed just fine. All objects parented with building, all exported without fuss and WITH metadata. Building showed in game perfectly, but was empty ... I know this isn't exhaustive and maybe this will work with some more experimentation. Since we can already place flavor object in buildings, it's easier to just do that with disguised objects which give best cover/restrict movement etc. Five minutes, pah, 50 minutes, I wish, 5 hours more like ...

Ain't that the truth! Yes the pixeltruppen seemed to respond properly to the revised depth of the model, no weird behaviour other than we can't see sh*t! Fo'sure! Blender 5 minutes ... LOL! That's one more step than many of us!