Lucky_Strike

Thanks Harry. It's cool that it appears for all sides and can be seen right across big maps. I've actually been doing some research on an actual chimney that Nigel showed me a pic of earlier which was a block from the Reichstag - so I'm going to scale it to that one, currently it's over 50m but needs to be about 25-35m at my guess. I'll post more details below with some pics. I really don't know what was going on with the original model, it looks like they ran out of time. Anyway it would be helpful if both you and Nigel can look at this one once I get it rescaled and nearer finished, you both know far more about buildings than I do, I'm just the hired help . It's actually quite straightforward adding the big chimney; biggest headache was getting all the original factory textures to load as we had that issue again of Blender ignoring textures with (00) appended to their names - the majority in this case! Think part of the problem with buildings, and so many of the models, is that the various objects have an origin relative to 0,0,0 and to a single model origin, or just to 0,0,0. This can be shown in Blender by displaying relationship lines. If one tries to use Apply > Location on objects like this they might have their origin reset to 0,0,0 which is very undesirable. I have come across the same problem with trees where each leaf branch has its own origin set relative to a single origin in the model at about 0,0,0. Applying location to the leaves will reset their origin to 0,0,0 and consequentially the leaves with sway relative to the wrong point, indeed in strong wind they actually detach en masse from the tree! I don't fully understand what we can do with this in buildings, but I'll leave it alone for now, applying scale and rotation only which seems fine. I suspect that some of the class stuff is in a database in the app itself, x type of building has y protection against HE etc. It probably takes the meta for the physical rendering of the model and does all the calculations based on the databases. Your hit boxes are likely to influence movement and LOS as you've said before being the physical aspects. Nah, he'll just have to do V3!!!!

Sorry about that, but I did at least manage to use tossers in a sentence ...

Okay so I've now had a look at the factory model to see if I can use that as a stoke house to go with the chimney - what a hot mess that model is. Looks like it was made as an after thought, quite a lot of stuff not really finished properly and actually a few missing textures as well as some incomplete materials. I have done some repair work, it's still not 100% perfectly functioning, there are issues with the damaged stages since it's missing correct internal textures and I have no idea what needs to be done to make this right. Luckily I was able to repeat some of the external walls for the internal walls so that it at least has windows in roughly the right positions inside. Since it was aligned at 45 degrees I thought I'd have a go at making it sit square, not a good idea, all sorts of odd stuff starts to happen - walls popping in and out of view, shadows where they shouldn't be, access issues, and pixeltruppen floating in mid air outside the building when supposedly inside. So we won't go there. As of now we have a factory with a big f*ck-off chimney as a building that can be used (no access to the chimney) and which behaves pretty much as expected bar one or two glitches with destroyed walls and a missing ceiling at the top level - I've done a bit of a Fred Dibna and blown it up a few times, takes quite a bit of HE before it disappears with a mighty big crash ... I found a few more factories on your map ... Butted up to a large complex it's quite convincing. The facade and roof will change to match location so you might want to make some Berlin textures; in these images it's using the [germany] tagged set. The brickwork on the chimney itself is a bit over sized at the moment. Battersea-am-Spree I'll see if I can fix the missing ceiling/floor and add a broken ladder to the chimney.

Bonne soirée mon ami, I hope your summer has been a good one. Yes my eyes are fixed. We have missed you here, so it's really great to see you back. There's lots for you to catch up with not to mention a whole new battlepack from GeorgeMC to play.

It's the curse of humanity to keep producing a never ending stream of absolute tossers who somehow seem to persuade enough people that they have something good to offer when in reality they are just snake oil salesmen ... we never learn. Anyway let's hope this latest rash of the world's biggest wankers is nearly done so that we can all get some peace for a while. Yes save your sanity for crunching that metadata!

Was hoping after the US midterms that he might just think twice about it, but of course his ego got the better of him. Trouble is crazy things can happen even when everything says it's just wrong - look at us in the UK with Brexit, who introduces sanctions on their own economy and trade? The only country in the history of the world to do that! There's a mass of meta for trees. Each leaf branch has its own set, independent from the overall tree metadata. However I don't think wind is determined directly by metadata since all leaf branches move when it's windy. What seems to determine it is the leaf parent name and the geometry. Any deviance from the mesh shape can stop movement, though not scale nor material. No doubt that the meta will contain the geometry also, so changing that will likely influence the ability to move as well, but the determining factor is hard coded somewhere.

LOL, cometh the day ... Thought I had them cracked ... never mind, we'll learn something from it. I actually think vehicles are way tougher, getting them moving properly is a real black art. Yeah, so hard to gauge when there's just nothing. PM might at least elicit an official yay or nay. OMG just got a news flash, Trump is gonna run for President again. And I thought things were bad here ... gawd save us all. Normal service is resumed ... Yeah I'm fairly optimistic that we could come up with an useable workflow that might improve the reliability of our models especially with regards to materials and UV mapping. Only one way to know for sure ... Re Metadata: whilst I've been doing trees I noticed that there are certainly values that look like they represent heights and there are two quite close numbers for each leaf object which might be the two surfaces or two vertices on the mesh.

Really appreciate how this is working now, especially liking the mixed woodland in your valley. Thanks for updating us.

The difference is absolute. The whole working paradigm is nothing like what we currently use, BUT it's actually very easy to port backwards by exporting the model complete with textures to fbx format then reimporting that to a fresh original mdr. The model comes in complete with textures, nothing missing, intact UV maps and all the gubbins necessary to then finish the model and export to final mdr. The process of importing the fbx is what we would do anyway for many third party models, only we have more control over texture use (bmps not png nor JPEG's nor anything else exotic), naming and UV mapping. All that we need to do can be achieved in version 3 whilst it seems that the modern GUI with nodes approach is more logical and easier to understand once one gets over the shock of the new.

UV mapping is the worst kind of madness, it's just nonsensical sometimes. Especially thanks to the disparity between the way Blender renders the texture (looks absolutely fine) with how the game engine renders the same (WTF!!!). I really don't know what's going on with the materials sometimes. Everything looks fine when the model is ready to export, all objects and meshes are assigned their material with associated textures, then at export it just refuses to work. Close examination of the materials list reveals an unnamed material - the only way I've spotted these is when they appear in the list of materials as a blank slot ABOVE named materials. Where they come from - I have no idea. I've tried renaming but sadly the damage is already done by the time they appear. Big problem with trees is that there are hundreds of leaf and branch meshes, and it's somehow possible for these materials to latch onto some of those. At least with leaves it's easier to replace the material as they are very simple meshes and the UV map is a simple shape. The branches however are relatively complex structures with UV maps that beautifully display the disparity between Blender and game rendering, which is why when it goes wrong it's every destructive. I suspect that most, possibly all material names themselves are not that important to the game, I have used custom names often enough, along with custom texture names, to no ill effect. So long as everything is named correctly and the dots are joined correctly everything is fine. The mesh names, though, do seem much more important in certain cases. Top level and secondary level object/mesh naming seems critical, but once meshes are parented to these then naming seems less important - it's likely that the game has a database lookup going on that instructs the engine what to do with certain meshes and objects. For example with tree models if secondary level leaves aren't named correctly they won't sway with windy conditions, they still appear but are static. My latest problem occurred when I remade a tall pine, the same model you recently tested. I took the working model and appended it to an original game tall pine tree type E mdr. I then edited the meshes and joined/parented them with the original mdr objects, as I've done previously. Everything looked good but export failed. My suspicion is down to how I appended my working model. I appended the Scene and in doing this I most likely included the unnamed material. But what is so annoying is that it worked in the appended model, and there's no way of seeing the blo*dy thing until it's too late. Rebuilt the whole thing a second time and it happened again, so I need to look at this process to find a better solution. Couple this with the destruction of the UV maps thanks to the necessity of having to replace the unnamed, unused material, and one can understand the frustration. Ultimately this may not even be a game engine issue but rather an issue with the export script which we know is incomplete. It again beggars the question though, why don't BF want to help us with some of this?There's nothing secret about these models; we're not trying to hack the app/exe, in fact we know we can't; we're not trying to put them out of business, nor steal anything. We gain pleasure from the games and our modding, and just want to make the games better which can only, ultimately, benefit BF. My suspicion is that this is just not on their radar at all, one is apparently in a jar whilst the other is far too busy to read more than one thread on their forum. Sour grapes, me, YES!

LOL dude sounds like Harry Potter! But yes we gotta get some of this stuff nailed down ... Just today working on one of my trees and nearly threw a chair at my monitor damn UV maps and weird material behaviour. No export cos of a none type error, blo*dy talk sensibly you boll*cking stupid app, who writes this sh*t, what the hell. I hate, hate, hate cryptic error messages. So it turned out that there was an unnamed material slot which must have come in with the model appended to the mdr - a model that previously worked I might add. The material wasn't assigned to anything, how could it be it was unnamed, it was just a blank space in a list, looking like all the other blank spaces, orphaned, not attached to anything except a UV map apparently. And enough to throw an error. Deleted the blank material and half the UV map disappears with it. Can't replace the material cos doing that makes half the UV map stuff go blank ... great, thanks. Bite the bullet, replace the material and redo half the UV map. Thankfully only some minor branches are messed up, mostly doesn't matter too much. But damned if I know why I can't replace materials without some major c*ckup happening. There seems to be no way to preserve a UV map independent of the material. Easy enough to swap textures around, but not the material. Don't try this at home kids! I'm actually wondering if doing all the work in a later Blender version might be a better approach. Having tried working with nodes a few time now I found it quite straightforward, we don't have very complex models, most are pretty similar, so the process is always mostly the same. With nodes one sets them up then, once finished, the model can be exported with textures baked in and then imported into the host mdr where it's joined with the host objects. The few times I've used it seemed quite painless. Will have to investigate further when time allows.

Always distracted - but it's all good. Yes will have to make a showroom scenario for all buildings (or should that be show home estate?) And I knew precisely when you posted it on here! I don't mind this. QBs are great for a bit of fun, but IMHO prepared scenarios offer much better experience. Second that I guess the ideal would be to have both types, let the scenario designer or players decide how fortifications should appear and be used. As you say, easier said ... Similarly, extra editor choices ... Hah, we just plough on ... Yeah, getting over the initial shock of Blender is part of the battle if one has never used 3D apps before. None of us is expert so sharing knowledge and ideas on here is essential. Yes there does at least seem to be a pattern with what needs to be done with most models to get them out of Blender and into the game. I'm going to look at the models I already have working to I can check that the metadata copy/paste thing is applied. I know there were some where metadata export just refused to work.

And he was enlightened ...!

Fantastic moonlight atmosphere, I can almost here Ole Blue Eyes himself crooning in the ... oops that's something else altogether. LUTs are great things - I know you don't have ReShade (sorry to rub salt in the wound and repeating what Harry said) but I have to mention that there are lots of FX available for that which also use LUTs, great for atmosphere, tiny file size and little to no discernible hit on framerates.

You're welcome. Not sure about the Trouble with Siegfried but you can always modify it in the editor, just don't peek at the force selection or opposition set up zones etc Or see if someone will kindly edit for you.

Yeah odd there is no normal maps for a potential game asset. Middle section friezes would definitely benefit from normal maps, just well made textures at present. The wings should be reasonably straightforward, but the middle section may need to be treated as a skinned flavour object, though a bridge would be better I really don't want to get into that whole other world of pain. We'll see ... You're right this is one possibility. As I found to my cost a black object can have several reasons. Alpha channel madness, is it 8-bit or 1-bit? (Who uses 1-bit? even back in 2010 this was old). Missing links in Blender - but I thought the script didn't let us export without textures he says to himself, not quite, it doesn't always know if a texture is there really. Blender can sometimes trick us that the texture is still connected to the material even when it's not and a different material might actually be in use. Blender is not always WYSIWYG! It can trick us. The script also doesn't care if a texture is a bmp or a jpeg or whatever, there's no check. It'll keep catching me out I'm sure

Isn't this what small children were employed to do back in your time? Turn the spit, go up chimneys ... that sort of thing.

I did buildings are about as much as I can get my head around at the moment. Even then there's so much to know about them/their models that I could easily get very distracted. I'm actually thinking it's just easier to forget the levels in this than try to make them work since I don't really know much about the workings of the buildings. There are quite a few models that I came across that perhaps could make better OP platforms than a tall industrial chimney. I'd be interested to know if there are any other tall structures (7 or 8 levels) that could be modelled to fully exploit this better. With the Brandenburg Gate there is also the potential to create a pretty tall OP. Yes if we are concerned about absolute playability, less so if it's just for eye candy. The bunkers, trenches and foxholes are already so extrapolated from reality that I feel trying out experiments with them to improve how they can look and maybe function is all we can hope for. Their mechanics are just not good. I'm personally prepared to suffer some oddness with their outer structure if they can just look a bit better in a scenario. Sort of like your wormhole bunker sitting more comfortably in the ground, it just improves how I feel about them when I see them in game. Ultimately I know they still don't do what I really want, but they probably never will. And this is where I think I can bring something to the table. I'm happy to try and make them look better, whilst I hope your experiments will give us better playability, or to at least see the limits of what's possible. Well LOL, I think we got a few more years yet, I think you'll have built a fully fledged time machine before we see a new engine! Yeah, equivalent of CM Sinclair C5 - seemed like a good idea at the time ... Until I made that chimney I had no idea that the bunkers were static vehicles ... why!!!? Definitely doable in Blender, but not sure what would happen regarding pixeltruppen occupying it. Again can someone please explain why ... this and some of the other indi buildings are only peaceable at an angle!? Sure it must have been discussed / griped about many times ...

Harry has already answered this for you Rob, but just to add. The mod, as it exists, is just a beta. I'm going to release a full, proper version that will be an all singing, all dancing affair with added textures. It will be part of an ongoing series of defensive works mods in expectation of getting the FB module one day. So far it can be used wherever there are hedgehogs, so any WW2 theatre. Enjoy!

It's a tough road my friend ... I know it's made doubly hard for you when so much of the tuition is in English. Keep plugging away at it I'm sure you'll get there in the end.

Well would say I'm envious. Most I've ever dug up is a bit of clay pipe, some bottles and old coins, plastic toys and occasional flint napped flakes. I do occasionally follow a couple of the metal detectorists on YT, always amazed at what they turn up.

Welcome masp, as a modder - thanks for your kind words. As a player - you need to jump to it, there's years worth of stuff here to get through, have fun fella!

Man, look at all that GREAT content! We are spoilt by you Kohl! Thank you so much for all your hard work and excellent fun stuff.

Great stuff. Do you keep it, sell it or what? No doubt the Beaute weapons were nearly all they could find in the warehouses at this stage. I've even seen SS units with similar, and plenty of WW1 stuff got issued as well. So long as it had ammo and could shoot straight-ish it was good to go.

The gate is a really good model for games, most were Photogrammetry and just bonkers complex. This one seems designed for games (modern games, LOL) so has good geometry for us to start with.