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Swobbly Minogue

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Everything posted by Swobbly Minogue

  1. Thankyou ever so much Marielle! I cannot believe I did not try putting the spinner value in the place you put it, I spent hours trying different layouts and it did not occur to me to put it there, which seems stupid in hindsight. Thankyou also for showing me how to add the random dice value I really appreciate your effort. Thanks also to Kwak for your input )
  2. Hi, This is not related to SL but I have leant so much from the folks in these forums over the years that I am going to ask for help here anyway as you guys rock! I am currently studying a design course that includes a Maxscript unit. So far things are just not "clicking" which is slowing my learning. This problem is confounded by the fact that my lecturer has very poor English and even when he explains things in great detail, it leaves many of his students befuddled. I am really hoping someone will be kind enough to spare some time here to help me out. Anyway, here is my specific problem: Initially I had to write a script that uses a 'for' loop to create 100 boxes at random positions. I did this (as you will see below). I then have to create a rollout with a button that when pressed, executes the above mentioned 'for' loop. I Did that. I then need to add a spinner that would allow the user to set how many random boxes are generated when the button is pressed. This is where I am having issues. I cannot work out how to link the spinner to the button to achieve the desired result. If someone could help with this then that would be great. After I have the spinner working I need to do the following: Add a 'dice roll' stopping condition, using a 20 sided dice. So the script stops looping if a 20 is rolled. There is a second stopping condition too, and that is if the number of boxes specified by the the user have been created then the script needs to stop. If neither of these conditions are true then the script will keep looping until a condition is met. I have no idea how to go about writing this, so any help would be much appreciated. Here is what I have written so far: [CODE] resetMaxFile #noprompt --resets the scence without a prompt try (destroydialog myrollout) catch () rollout myrollout "testing" width:350 height:713 ( button but_01 "Random Boxes" pos:[37,7] width:88 height:21 spinner spn-01 "Box Qty" pos:[136,8] width:46 height:16 range:[0,100,50] on but_01 pressed do (mybox = box length:10 width:10 height:10 wirecolor:blue --new box for i = 1 to 100 do --repeat 100 times, for each iteration ( box_copy = copy mybox --create a copy of the original box box_copy.pos = random [-20, -20, 0] [80, 80, 0]) --place a random position within the defined coords ) ) createdialog myrollout 200 200 [/CODE] If anyone has the time and knowledge to help then I would be very grateful. Thanks.
  3. Zak Kozlov wrote: That work great thank you I had to ask a friend who know some more about alpha layers than me in photoshop hehe once you know how this solution is just perfect Thanks alot *give you a bag of gummybears * Can you tell me exactly what you did in Photoshop please as I am having problems with this too. Thanks :matte-motes-big-grin:
  4. Hi, I have a question related to RTT in Max, so will post here to save starting a new thread. I want to be able to bake a texture that results in my shadows starting from black and fading into transparency. At the moment my shadows start from black and fade into white. I would also like the background of the texture to be transparent too. Is there any way to do this in the RTT process? If not is there anything I can do in Photoshop with my baked texture so I just end up with shadows fadding into transparency. Thankyou.
  5. Great, thanks. I just striped the materials down to 1 on the mesh and imported it again and it is now rendering as expected. What an annoying bug!
  6. Yes, Mesh B, the one that dropped at 3m did indeed have 3 materials mapped on. Mesh A only had 1 material. This would definitely explain it. I didn't even think that materials would be relevant which is why I did not mention them in my OP. So until this bug is fixed we should only use 1,2.5,6,7 or 8 materials? Thanks Kwak :smileyhappy:
  7. Hi. I am getting confused over LOD's and when they switch from a higher level to a lower level. I thought there were 3 factors that went into determining this. 1 - camera distance from the object. 2 - The size of the object 3 - RenderVolumeLODFactor setting in the viewer. If this is true then the following problem that I am seeing does not make sense. I have uploaded exactly the same mesh twice. The first one, "Mesh A" was uploaded at the weekend. It had custom built LOD's and physics shape. The second one "Mesh B" was uploaded today had auto generated LOD's and physics. Other than the LOD's and the physics, these meshes are identical in shape, same size bounding box, same number of poly's and verts etc. The LI is obviously different as the LOD's and physics have not been optimized on Mesh B. So when I rez them in world and place Mesh A and Mesh B next to each other, perfectly aligned and zoom my camera in to 1m they look identical. Then I pull my camera back to about 3m and Mesh B suddenly drops to the next LOD (medium). Mesh A stays the same, no LOD drop. I keep panning out and get to 10m and Mesh B drop LOD again (Low) and mesh A makes it's first LOD drop (medium) 10m is when I would expect an LOD drop on an item of this size (0.5m x 0.5m x 2m) So why is Mesh B dropping LOD levels at 3 meters and Mesh A isn't? Why aren't these 2 meshes switching LOD's at the same time. They are the same size, being viewed at the same distance with the same viewer? What other factors drive the drop in the LOD? Many thanks.
  8. Brilliant! Thank you Kwak, I will try this when I get home.
  9. Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: A multi/sub is simply a collection or group of materials. Yep. I assumed you use multi/sub to bring together a selection of materials so they can be merged together into one materail. Otherwise what is the point of it. You may as well just use seperate materials and avoid sub object all together. See what I mean? lack of understanding :matte-motes-big-grin-squint: Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: I still don't understand what you are after:) For the purposes of this test I wanted to make a cube that had selectable faces in SL. I then wanted to create a texture using multi/sub that combined 6 different textures, 1 for each face of the cube. But I wanted to merge the six textures into one, export the texture to SL then drop it on each face of the cube. I was hopeing each part of the texture would appear onthe correct face of the cube, seeing as I had UV mapped it in max. Failed lol Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Do you want one texture to texture your entire box, or do you want six different textures on your box, so you can seperately edit them in SL? I want 1 texture for the whole box. But I then want to be able to select the faces in SL and edit colour, shine etc. Just a little test I set myself.
  10. Thanks for answering, it's appreciated. I'll try and clarify but I think it's my lack of understanding that is the problem despite reading/watching numerous tutorials. I assume a Multi/sub-object material is basically a way to combine multiple tetures into one texture. I know you can select polygons, apply a material modifier and assign a sub-material to that selection, then UV map that selection. Once that has been done for every sub material, This is where i get stuck. I assumed I could just merge the sub materials into one texture that I could export. Then just apply that texture to the mesh that had previously been UV maped in max. I assume I can just drag and drop that finished merged texture onto each face of the mesh in SL. I've not got that far yet so this is all theory on my part. Re. using Rendert to texture, I did only select "diffuse" as I assumed that would just render the BITMAPS without any other effects. I will go back and play around again with the Render to texture options Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: To bake all 6 materials into 1, make two UVs, one for the source, containing the seperate materials, one for the destination, which will be one texture. You can select the channel when rendering to texture. This just went over my head i'm afraid.. What is the source? there are multiple sources arn't there in a multi sub material. Also what is the channel, i've not encountered that. thanks
  11. Hi, I have been trying to import a basic textured mesh cube. Im using Max 2010 with the 2011.3 FBX plugin as recommend on the wiki for my version of Max. I'll take you through my process in case I am missing something obvious So I have created a multi/sub-object material containing 6 materials, one for each side of the cube. I've UV maped the cube using the basic box mapping and can see that each faced has been assigned an ID number and that ID number corosponds to the ID in the Material editor. This is all fine. So I go to export the model to a .dae file. i don't change anything in the FBX export window, I can;t see anything there relating to materials or textures anyway. Just click OK. So into the SL viewer, I import the model, ticking the checkbox for textures in the import window. No textures arrive. The mesh is fine. I can select all 6 individual faces. So no big deal I thought, I can just export my multi/sub-object texture from max and manually texture the mesh in SL. This is where I got stuck completely I cant work out how to get the texture out off Max and into SL. I've tried Rendering/Render to texture but cant seem to get the texture to render without lighting effects, despite the fact there are no lights. i could UVW unwrap the cube and Render a UVW Template load it into photo shop and put the texture together but that seems like a lot of work for something that should be simple. So can anyone tell me how to upload the textures directly with .dae Failing that can anyone tell me how to export my multi/sub-object material into a single texture so I can manually apply it to the cube. Sorry for the lengthy post, just thought it best to cover what I have done in case I am missing something obvious. Thanks!
  12. Thanks Medhue. Do you normally use a 512 x 512 texture or can we get away with 1024 x 1024? A 512 x 512 texture seems awfully low res if used on a larger object, but I was always taught to never use higher than 512 x 512 when building in SL? What do you think?
  13. Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Again, in 3ds max, if the objects are seperate in the scene before uploading, they will be linked in SL, but seperate objects. So you can indeed use 8 materials on each of them. IN 3DS max can I create 8 seperate materials and apply them to my model or do I need to create 1 multi/sub-object material with up to 8 sub-materials? Or do both work? Also how do you import the texture? Is it automatically exported in the .dae and applied to the model when imported inworld? or do I need to extract and upload the texture seperately. Sorry for the noobishness of the question, still new to Max and currently stuck on UVW unwrapping, not actually got to the point of uploading a texture yet.
  14. Thanks Kwak. So can I assume you only need to reset transforms if you are planning on importing a rigged mesh? I have no plans on creating rigged content.
  15. Hello, I am new to 3D modeling, learning so I can create mesh. I am using 3DS Max 2010. I am hoping someone can explain what this term means in the 3DS Max section on the SL Wiki. " You can use any of the modeling tools while working on your item, but in the final form it should be saved as an Editable Poly, with Reset Transforms applied, and the stack collapsed." What exactly does "Reset Transforms" mean. I've searched google and this forum but i'm still not completely sure, I think it has something to do with making sure that everything in a scene is alligned at 0,0,0 coords possibly? So, what exactly does "Reset Transforms" mean and and how do I go about applying that in 3DS max 2010? Thanks very much in advance for any help offered to this stumbling mesh noob. :smileyhappy:
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