3d Studio Max, Openzone & Terrain Basics I

[GeorgeS]

Although I made a tree tutorial years ago, I lost the file, and would very much enjoy if a new tutorial be made on trees and transparency. This is one part I have the greatest trouble with.

If there's a good tut on this which i can verify to work, I will freely release several hundred tree meshes and building props I made or textured.

GeorgeS

[Windcatcher]

Excellent tutorial! A handful of these would probably go a long way toward getting people up to speed.

I think that error you got when exporting was because you don't have the eqemu_maps folder, so OpenZone couldn't create the file. I could put a check into OpenZone to see if that's the case and let you know that the folder isn't there.

[Richardo]

Cool Windcatcher. Hey, do you have any idea how to make a masked DDS file? I forgot how completely. I know you do it through photoshop and export it i as TGA file and then GraphicConvert.exe it to .dds. But I don't know the method in photoshop.

[Windcatcher]

You mean for trees? For OpenZone you need to take a 24-bit .BMP where the mask color is in the majority of the four corner pixels, and use OpenZone's command under the File... menu to turn it into a 32-bit transparent .BMP. Then you can use it with OpenZone.

[Richardo]

nvm.........

[Richardo]

Hey Windcatcher, can you help me find a way to draw terrain textures? :p I'm having a hard time creating roads, etc without creating a terrain image that is 20382308x2048204824

Any ideas? :p Texture shading/mapping in 3ds max is easy but it isn't supported in the cross over.

[Windcatcher]

Hmm. Do you know if .3DS files support multitexturing (with or without alpha blending)? If it does and if I can get a sample I can try adding support to OpenZone and SimpleClient, but that technique would only work for .XWF files (WLD files can't handle it). Do you need to make zones for the live client or only for SimpleClient? I'm guessing the former, but I have to ask. For .WLD files perhaps you could make a low-res zone texture, but that wouldn't look that great, or perhaps a low-res zone texture that is only used where there are roads?

Exporting to .EQG is a possibility, but I have no information at all on the format and I'd hate to have to go that route as it would take a lot of effort away from other things (for instance, I'm maybe halfway through building a human female player model and I plan to complete it this weekend, then I want to do GeorgeS' spider models). I then want to populate the Veldona zone with mobs and do another full-up release of SimpleClient, after releasing OpenZone 8.4.