Topic: Babylon 5 Models

[Bartok]

Greetings All -

Many of you may already have links to these sites, but I've come across some wonderful models.
http://www.sf3dmodels.boom.ru/

http://homepage.eircom.net/~bcelestia/
Most of these are in lightwave .lwo format and are high-poly.  I've got links to 2 sites, I came across the second of the 2 first.  I'm not familiar with "celestia" as a modding program, but some of the files there are in .3ds and I could import them into MilkShape - though not always "completely"

Anyhoo - thought i'd share the links to these sweet models 

Cheers

[Bartok]

BTW -

ANy of you Milkshape Gurus:

When I"ve done my partial imports of some of the models from the sites above there are a few that do import completely.  When I've tried to "export" into the .mod format it gives me the error message "All material must have textures".  It then creates .bmp's of the .jpgs used as textures and a 1Kb .mod file - with the name I specified.  I try and open them in the Taldren mod viewer, but can't see a thing?

MY gut is that the taldren modviewer just can't handle the # of polys.  So I can't confirm (short of including the new mod into a shiplist and loading it up) whether the files will display in game (SFCOP).  Also - the bmps that are created seemto all be 8bit, 512pixel bmps - so they should work? 

So I'm wondering if folks have encountered this error message before, yet also seen "partially" successful behavior?  And

Does anyone know of a Milkshape Tool that can "automagically" reduce the number of polys while still retaining the models overall shape?

I'd LOVE to see some of these ships in a game

Any thoughts?

[CaptainTombs]

you wont beable to simply convert from lwo to mod, lwo has many whats the word surfaces and objects that mod files cant handle, youll have to either remove them and reduce the poly count somehow, either way most of the b5 ships have been done just need convertin i think to sfc3

[Bartok]

ThanX CaptainTombs -

In the interim I figured out what was happening (re: the error message of materials not having textures).  That was where some of the problem lay.  After tinkering a bit with it I was able to successfully convert these to .mod format.... they're pretty dam big and I"m about to log on to my test server to see how they loadup.  All totalled I converted 5 I think - for starters.  Versions of the Vorlon Planet Killer, Transport and 3 others...

I have seen "some" B5 models out there, and on previous servers.  The Vorlon DN, Shadow Battle Crab, and 2 Minbari Ships - Sharlin and Tinashi.  That being said I found the quality of the high res mods on those pages to be so far superior that I just have to give it a shot.  I've never modded for SFC3, I know it can handle somewhat higher res than SFCOP, but I'm not really interested in SFC3 anymore.  To be sure, the community has done a lot with modding that version, but I like my seeking weapons 

ThanX for your response!

[Mackie]

you wont beable to simply convert from lwo to mod, lwo has many whats the word surfaces and objects that mod files cant handle, youll have to either remove them and reduce the poly count somehow, either way most of the b5 ships have been done just need convertin i think to sfc3

Actually... Lightwave models are fairly more "efficient" than Max models.
Usually when you do lwo -> 3ds conversion the polycount can go up anything from 200 to 1000~ polies.
I suppose that has something to do with max models having to be triangulated or whatnot?

[Tus-XC]

not really, you can use quads in max as well, its the mod file that has to use triangles