scotg

Is that last post meant for me, Mikero? The last three posts were you, me, you, so I assume it was meant for me. I donated/subscribed late last week, and I'm in - all good. I just needed some rest, and to stop working for a night, to get fresh eyes and find the signposts for using paypal that way. BTW, Thank you for the tools (in case I haven't said it before)!

Maybe I missed it, but is there something set up for donating through paypal besides just an email address, like a landing page to help people become subscribers? I've only used paypal with ebay, and there's usually a process they walk users through. EDIT: It turns out I maybe just needed sleep. I found everything I needed to know once I got rest, and then downloaded the July updates and began the installs.

So it seems I already had the green channel reversed. It must be pretty common in Cry Engine, the previous engine I used to make models for. Anyway I went ahead and uninverted the green channel just to see the difference. That messed things up in a different way, so I set it back the way I had it and reexamined the output. This time, I made a simple wheel and tested it in buldozer, for the sake of simplicity and focus. So if it's not the flipping of the green channel that was wrong, it's some other factor that I'm revisiting. After time, I've forgotten that it was the way Real Virt. engine automatically deals with surfaces. When I apply a baked normal, it makes otherwise flat surfaces look concave. Basically, the normal map is overcorrecting the geometry.

Announcing the 1990-ish Lamborghini LM002. This is the fuel-injected version fitted with a Diablo V12 engine, which allows for a smaller hood bump and better visibility than the carbureted Countach V12 did. This model currently features the OZ wheels, eight different randomly assigned paint schemes, psudo-flex suspension, detailed lighting, four crew positions including driver, and full-time 4WD. It is intended to increase the diversity of your POVs and GOVs (personally/government owned vehicles - non combat). How do I download? It's not released yet. I'm trying to figure out how to package the mod and protect it. I've been working on this mod solo, so I'm learning ArmA mod'ing one step at a time. Without a team to pool resources, it goes very slow. So why announce if it's not ready? I need to harness support and interest in the project. Also, I'm hoping it gets attention from some capable people willing to lend help to get it out there. I've been working solo out of necessity, not preference, and I've got other projects in the works. What work does it need? As mentioned before, the current release would just need to be packaged up so that people can't steal its content. Future releases will need help with additional functions like opening doors, creating proper driver and crew animations, getting the speedo, tacho, and fuel gauge working just right, adding fire geometry and wrecked geometry. If there's a way to increase its top speed a little bit to about 136 mph, that'd be good & accurate. There's probably a few other things I haven't thought of that could be useful. I also might make first-responder version. So what does work on it? It drives and performs well. It seats a driver and three passengers, so far (there's room for two more in the back). The lights work and look better than lights on vanilla cars. The suspension animation is at an "it'll do" level, using very basic vertex assignments (causes a stretch look rather than a mechanical look, but still better than being not animated). There are eight color patterns that are assigned at random. Some have solid colors, and some have graphics. Some have chrome, some do not. There are seven visible distance LODs, and a cargo LOD. As a Lamborghini SUV, it has great acceleration and formidable hill climb ability. All three mirrors work in cargo view LOD. Killing it will show it being on fire, with the tires blown out (though it will have its nice paint job). I probably left out some things. Overall, it's fun to use, and a helpful addition to any server.

Can anyone point to a link for buldozer command modifiers, or if it's a short list just post them? My buldozer opens in a 4:3 window, but my ArmA3 is set up for 16:9, so all the assets in buldozer look scrunched together. Hopefully there's a modifier for that.

You may notice I have mostly quads. The .p3d will have tris. When I'm ready to export the max file, I save and then add edit mesh modifier to all objects, and make all edges visible. Then I add edit poly modifier, and export selected. Once that has gone through successfully, I delete those two modifiers to maintain the model how I prefer to work. If something goes wrong in that time, then I have that save point right before export. I do very, very minimal editing in OB - stuff like moving elements with overlapping vertices into place, as in the first wireframe pic.

I have several material sets. Anything that is on the main body paint, including the door jams, is on one UV set. This part uses one of eight 2048x2048 color textures, one of three SMDIs, and one of three RVMATs, and is the named selection called "Camo1." That's the randomized part. The rest of the vehicle uses non-random colors. The UV sets for those are one 2048 for undercarriage and exterior plastic, a 2048 for interior, a 1024 for glass including interior glass and lights, a 1024 for wheels/tires, and another 2048 for gauge faces and button labels - big for legibility. Whatever the color size, the corresponding maps are the same size (e.g.: 1024 _co gets a 1024 _nohq). The bevelling works, but It was a result of not figuring out those flipped green channel normal baking. I could probably shave off about 1500 in LOD1. However, LOD2 and so on resort to using different smoothing groups where there'd otherwise be a soft edge - only because they're further away.

I have certain things floating because they tend to get fused to the model and screw up the mesh smoothing. I just lower them in OB. Side note for warden_1: I switch back and forth between poly and mesh. Mesh for when I want to turn hidden edges, and poly to mitigate effing up my UVs.

Ok I feel embarrassed. I imagined you wanted a rendered wireframe composite. I don't know why I jumped to that conclusion. I can easily do a max screenshot (but I use F3 to change viewport to wired). I'm so sorry, warden_1.

It might be easy. I've never looked into how to do it that fast. I've always done it the hard way: rendering it out, then photoshopping the layers together, then adjusting brightness and/or colors, etc. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your motives here, but guy, don't try to make me feel bad just because I'm a noob at certain things like instant wireframing with a mere 3-click limit. It takes me more than that just to open this thread. I've been politely answering your questions the most (which seem a little demanding and almost suspicious); you can show me the same respects - politeness. If I'm off base, then I do apologize in advance.

It's another WIP <LINK>. But don't worry about that one for now; it's a long way out. ;-)

Really good to know about that green channel. Thanks!! I don't usually do wireframe pics. It's a few extra steps, time and set up that I could be using to model or texture something else. I've got a lot to create, finish creating, and then somehow learn to make them work well in ArmA3. Maybe I'll get to making wireframes someday, but no promises. Besides, I know if I can see wireframes on other vehicles it's a little bit like reverse engineering to me. I see polygons as it is, so then showing me your wireframe is like giving me a map to your treasure. I don't want to give people the map to my treasure. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I should be a little :-)

I have two black paint jobs. One is gloss black, but the bumpers rails are chrome. The other has black bumpers, but there is an Italian stripes graphic on the sides. If chrome and graphics are too flashy, then the most inconspicuous color scheme is a gloss gray with black bumpers. All color schemes at this point have a gloss finish. Here's the list: 1. Gray and Purple with Faceplant Games Logo (my start up biz) and chrome bumpers. 2. Gray with standard black bumpers 3. Red with standard black bumpers 4. Blue with chrome bumpers and chrome bedrails 5. Yellow with black Lambo graphics and bumpers 6. White with white bumpers 7. Black with chrome bumpers 8. Black with Italian stripes and black bumpers This requires 8 _co.paa files, and 3 _smdi.paa files. I think I can find a better way to mix the solid colors and chrome using just rvmats, which are smaller in size than .paa files. For example, I might be able to use the gray or white body file and adjust the color settings in the rvmats, then I could have fewer big 2048 img files and more colors with more, smaller rvmat files. We'll see. All the graphics schemes would still have to be their own files, though.

I almost forgot, I used the sounds from the vanilla SUV for now. It's hard to find sounds of a LM002 non-tuned. Also... I'm not good with foley.

I made this from scratch. I've worked on it a long while, and have had to go back and re-arrange some angles and measurements when I find new source material - usually large sized photos. Originally, I had made a Cobra Stinger with this model <LINK>, but I decided to release a civilian version which is more true to life. The triangles have evolved so much since then, that I'd need to base the Stinger off of this now. I usually make my HP models from my LP models, but only for normal baking. Since I can't seem to get normal baking to look right in this game, I just use photoshop to make normal map details and skip the normal baking step. It's probably a little higher in polycount than I'd prefer, but I got it under 26k in LOD1. Some interior pics (I know interior needs some texture detail work): Sorry for harsh shadows.

Thanks for trying, but it's no good. I'm not sure what that was supposed to accomplish, but it sure didn't help for viewing my heli in buldozer. Yes, I have some elements very close to each other, like the instrument panels on and the instrument panels off. They are slightly apart so they don't accidentally become one, and this technique works for all my other vehicles which do show up in buldozer, as well as for the vanilla vehicles. Here's something I did: I opened a model file that works with buldozer and pasted the copied heli model into a new LOD, then I tried the same approach in an all-new file. It worked both times, which leads me to believe that the original file has something out of place. If I can't figure out what's going on, I may have to xfer all the model LODs to a new file and overwrite (replace) the old one.

After digging through buldozer troubleshooting threads, I'm still in search of an answer to my problem. I have several .p3d files that work well and display their objects in buldozer, and the triangle counts range from 5,000 to 25,000 displayed without flaw. There is one file, however, that doesn't show up in buldozer at all. Buldozer starts up normally, but the result is a blank blue void. It's a 16,000 triangle helicopter. I looked at the vertex properties, and there are no hidden or ground faces, except for the hidden proxies. I tried different LODs, but none displayed. All faces were trianglized in 3DSMax before importing, This is the only model suffering from this problem, so I maybe have a setting off. Also, it my be a related issue that the famous yellow wire mesh is associated with the view geometry LOD, rather than LOD1. I can't remember how to change that. On a side note, I updated Windows 10, which kicked my P: drive back to barebones. However, buldozer still works when I open the files through the normal directory. I can't remember if the helicopter wasn't displayed before the update, but I'm acting on the assumption that it did not.

I finally figured it out, but I still think it's way too complicated. There are several steps needed to get to having the option to turn on gun control. I'm not even sure what I did this time, but I'm pretty sure the option wasn't always on the actions menu. It's a fantastic mod, but it's way too technical, and not very forgiving. Once you finally get it right it flies decently, and its gun control is fairly accurate. It would be cool for a mod to feature a more intuitive heli-pilot-controlled-gun set up, but also require the pilot to be wearing a certain helmet in order to control the main gun.

I'm confused now. I thought the purpose of this topic was to discuss the possibility to control the main gun, as a pilot, with TrackIR. Could you please clarify, because your post along with the post you quoted seems to dismiss the topic?

It's time for an initial release, but I need help. Details in first post.

Update 19August2016: Ready to prep for an initial release. I've tested the vehicle in the Editor and Virtual Garage. It has come along nicely: Suspension is working. Lights are great. Shadows look nice. LODs transition really well. 8 randomized colors. There are some minor adjustments needed: Instruments aren't aligned to actual value, especially the speedo. No firegeom LOD. Using a stock Driver animation, so hands and feet are a little off. Could benefit from a little more texture detail. I'd like to eventually implement a few more extra details - like door animations and whatnot. No passenger positions in truck bed, yet. Apart from the few known issues it's good for an initial release if people want to start playing with it, so what's my next step to release it? I know it's not protected, so what files do I need to create, and how do I do that? Any help, guidance, encouragement is much appreciated! Update 20July2016: Most major issues are reasonably resolved, although things are far from perfect. Currently, the movement and animations of the vehicle are more refined - not at all to a match with real life performance, but at least giving a better illusion that this is a functional vehicle. The textures are getting better - more detailed and less texelized (patches of 4 pixels blocking together after optimizing). The lights function well, and I dare say the exterior lights look far better than the vanilla vehicles' lights (except where there is over-exposure on the grille from the two headlights merging). The suspension and steering could be better, but they function well. I need to tighten the turn radius of the whole LM002, but also lessen the turn angle of the individual steer wheels. For suspension there are a few things that I'd really love to accomplish... The named selections for all the suspension functions are named correctly, and the tire sizes match so that the tires are not floating/sinking. I've assigned certain suspension pieces such that there *sort of* an appearance of working parts, but really they are just flexing and stretching - something that rigid mechanical parts don't usually do. If you're focused on the game and not looking too hard, it'll be fine for peripheral animation. Should there ever be a raised suspension version of this vehicle (or any other vehicle), then this method would be far more noticeable. I still wonder if there is another way... Here is the same initial YouTube video going over the old problems, most of which have been resolved: LM002 WIP Meanwhile, here's a preview pic in-game:

Now that you mention it, I think I remember reading that somewhere, but it may have been hearsay. Would you say it requires complex scripting? From what I saw while poking around in the Apache .sqf files, the IHAADs files were short and simple, but there was another .sqf file which handled a LOT of functions. Thus, it was very complex. They may have commented explanations in it, but I didn't look very hard.

Yes. I took a peek at some of their scripting for that vehicle, and I play-tested it. I could see head tracking working for the Apache's sensor, but not for the gun. They provide instructions for getting it to work, but after aligning all the ducks it still doesn't work - not even for the copilot. At first glance it seems they achieve their gun and sensor head tracking in the additional .sqf files, but I wonder if that's only out of the need for its complexity. So, could a simpler pilot turret be done using only the standard .cpp file? Kudos to those guys for such an in-depth and technical vehicle mod, but it's way over the top for what I want to achieve for my helis. If I were to dissect that, I might get swamped trying to cut through the numerous unneeded parts.

two things about that: 1. What if the lag isn't depending on the completion of the audio file. Maybe it depends on a given scripted value. 2. There should still remain some amount of lag for authenticity. A real driver wouldn't usually start moving the very instant the commander gave the command, though he might start moving in mid-command if they were like-minded and the commander takes a long time to spit out his words. Likely though, he'll have to take a second or two to process what he heard through all the machine noise inside the tank and headset before he moves. My main agreement with this thread is the problems with how an AI drives a tank or operates its turret. Driver lag isn't as big of a deal to me.

Sorry to dig this up, but has anyone had success with creating pilot turrets for custom choppers? I have modeled a one-man, turret enabled chopper that I'd like to be able to get its weapon turret functioning. As it is right now, I have added a temporary gunner proxy so that I can at least test the turret, its gun, and its searchlight (pretty cool to see the searchlight swiveling on the turret). Ultimately, the gunner position has to go; it is a one-man airframe after all. I also have a few other small vehicles where I'd like to have some pilot/driver control over movable turrets: small one-man tracked armor, police car with searchlights on the windshield post, one-man vtol patrol craft.