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Frstwlf said:
Thanks to everyone in this thread, and especially Mandrac, I've managed to make my ships appear in game. So thank you all for that!

Could you perhaps share you .dds settings? My ship's a little... bright.
Click to expand...
It's not the .dds, rather the shader used. Try the PdxMeshTerra for export and check back here.
Wuija said:
Do you know how to make transparent parts now? I think its something about the shader "PdxMeshTerraAlphaBlend" used in tranparent parts for the vanilla ships, but i dont know how to make this shader in maya :s
Click to expand...
You can add the shaders supported/defined for Stellaris in your \Documents\Paradox Interactive\PdxExporter\settings\clausewitz.txt file.
Just write the shaders you want recognized after materials and don't forget to increase the s #.
I've found the "PdxMeshClouds" shader to be the one with best results for transparent parts in ships, as it doesn't have the "emissive" attribute that makes it glow really bright.
 
Danik said:
It's not the .dds, rather the shader used. Try the PdxMeshTerra for export and check back here.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your help. Unfortunately, this is what I did the first time. Which is why I think it has to do with my specular map. The texture exporter only exports .tga files when I run it, and I don't know why. I've seen there's a TextureConverter.exe with .bat files in the pdx_exporter folder, but I haven't been able to make it work yet.

Edit: Okay so it's not the best but it's better I think.

syanS15.jpg


In the end it was both the normal and specular maps that were borked. I modified each channel manually following vanilla texture references. It's a pita but the only way I can do it for now. ):
 
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Frstwlf said:
The texture exporter only exports .tga files when I run it, and I don't know why.
Click to expand...

Are you sure you checked the "export DDS" button ? It's almost invisible...
 
Danik said:
It's not the .dds, rather the shader used. Try the PdxMeshTerra for export and check back here.

You can add the shaders supported/defined for Stellaris in your \Documents\Paradox Interactive\PdxExporter\settings\clausewitz.txt file.
Just write the shaders you want recognized after materials and don't forget to increase the s #.
I've found the "PdxMeshClouds" shader to be the one with best results for transparent parts in ships, as it doesn't have the "emissive" attribute that makes it glow really bright.
Click to expand...

Ty for your help mate. I don't understand why increase the s #. How it work?
 
The number after the "s" is the number of entries in the list.
So you have (just examples)

material s 1 "PdxMeshShip"

and

material s 2 "PdxMeshShip" "AnotherShader"
 
Danik said:
It's not the .dds, rather the shader used. Try the PdxMeshTerra for export and check back here.

You can add the shaders supported/defined for Stellaris in your \Documents\Paradox Interactive\PdxExporter\settings\clausewitz.txt file.
Just write the shaders you want recognized after materials and don't forget to increase the s #.
I've found the "PdxMeshClouds" shader to be the one with best results for transparent parts in ships, as it doesn't have the "emissive" attribute that makes it glow really bright.
Click to expand...

Kliwarrior said:
The number after the "s" is the number of entries in the list.
So you have (just examples)

material s 1 "PdxMeshShip"

and

material s 2 "PdxMeshShip" "AnotherShader"
Click to expand...

ty so much guys, its done!
 
Edit:

Never mind, I found the error. It turns out I was naming the wrong "tab" of the locator. It is now located where it should be.

Original post:

Mandrac said:
Don't worry i already did tuto about making models for source by the past. It's just i like to have a grasp on what i'm doing befor making a tuto about it.
I'll try to summarise "quickly" what I know as of right now about making ship into the game.

First is instaling the exporter
which is more tricky than it sound depending of your folder settup.
What i know:
If like a lot of people you have a hard drive/partition reserved for windows and have moved your documents and stuff on another drive/partition know that the installer of the exporter will instal the plugin for maya and its setting file on the system drive anyway ( default C: )
...
Click to expand...

Following your tutorial I managed to get a ship into de game, but the gun locators don't seem to work. Wherever I put them in Maya, afterwards in the game they are at the origin (or the joint, I can't tell since the joint is at the origin).

Any idea what could have I done wrong?

EatuhcP.jpg

It's supposed to be down at the bottom of the semisphere.
Click to expand...
 
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These are some very good instructions, and i've tried to follow them the best i can, but i still don't think i'm getting it right, so far, all i've managed to get into the game is that wierd coloured box thing as my first attempt, then with my second, the model was invisible, except for a little glow effect where the engine hardpoint was (I think), but with those first two attempts, i didn't have a 'frame' mesh for the model, or listed in the asset/gfx files. The wiki doesn't even mention exporting two different meshes.

Does anyone know what unit scale Stellaris uses? How big would the model have to be in Maya to appear, say, 2km long ingame?
 
Grim_T_Reaper said:
These are some very good instructions, and i've tried to follow them the best i can, but i still don't think i'm getting it right, so far, all i've managed to get into the game is that wierd coloured box thing as my first attempt, then with my second, the model was invisible, except for a little glow effect where the engine hardpoint was (I think), but with those first two attempts, i didn't have a 'frame' mesh for the model, or listed in the asset/gfx files. The wiki doesn't even mention exporting two different meshes.

Does anyone know what unit scale Stellaris uses? How big would the model have to be in Maya to appear, say, 2km long ingame?
Click to expand...

You don't necessarily need a frame mesh, but you have to create the ship size and design so it refers to your ship as the general design and not as a section. You can do this if your ship is one solid mesh, but if it is split up in different parts then you need to have each of them be a section and the frame (which is only joints or locators) as the general design.

The units in Maya are the default units, so if you make it ~10 units long it should be around the same size as a battleship.
 
Well, after some tinkering, I finally got the model into the game, but....this is what I got:

shipimporttest2.jpg


As you can see, that is.....not what i wanted to happen. :p I have no idea what went wrong with the textures there, i set them up correctly in substance designer (faster and easier than photoshop). The science ship is there for scale. It's supposed to be a borg cube.

Here what the model is SUPPOSED to look like (a render from maya):

borg_cube_maya_render.jpg


And, when viewing the model from a certain angle in game, I get this....

normals glitch.jpg

I have NO idea what's causing that. (I spawned two of the models as a test)
 
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What shader are you using? How do your texture maps look?

The exploding mesh can be caused by having an animated mesh without states, or a static mesh with an animation. Can you post the entity and mesh scripts, please?
 
K-vald said:
What shader are you using? How do your texture maps look?

The exploding mesh can be caused by having an animated mesh without states, or a static mesh with an animation. Can you post the entity and mesh scripts, please?
Click to expand...

Sorry it took me so long to put this post together, anyway, here goes.

The model was originally using the PdxMeshShip shader, then i went into the gfx file and changed it to PdxMeshTerra, as someone had tried that in a previous post, but it had no effect.

The gfx and asset files are copies of the _mammalian_01_ships files (so in this case, changed to _borg_01_ships_meshes/entities, respectively), just copied and renamed, and the relevant entries altered to point the new model and textures, like so:

From the ~_meshes.gfx file:
Code: 
    #######  Battleship mid sections  #######           
        
        
    pdxmesh = {
        name = "borg_01_battleship_mesh"
        file = "gfx/models/ships/borg_01/borg_01_battleship.mesh"
        scale = 10.0

        meshsettings = {
            name = "borg_01_battleship_coreA"
            index = 0
            texture_diffuse = "borg_01_battleship_diffuse.dds"
            texture_normal = "borg_01_battleship_normal.dds"
            texture_specular = "borg_01_battleship_specular.dds"
            shader = "PdxMeshTerra"
        }
    }

From the ~_entities.asset file:

Code: 
#MID
entity = {
    name = "borg_01_battleship_entity"
    pdxmesh = "borg_01_battleship_mesh"
   
    default_state = "idle"
    state = { name = idle    state_time = 5
        event = { time = 0 node = "light_01" particle = "ship_light_blue_effect" keep_particle = yes trigger_once = yes }
        event = { time = 0 node = "light_02" particle = "ship_light_blue_effect" keep_particle = yes trigger_once = yes }
    }
   
    state = { name = moving    state_time = 5
        event = { time = 0 node = "light_01" particle = "ship_light_blue_effect" keep_particle = yes trigger_once = yes }
        event = { time = 0 node = "light_02" particle = "ship_light_blue_effect" keep_particle = yes trigger_once = yes }
    }
   
    state = { name = "death" state_time = 5 }
}

Though i don't actually have any animations on the model, I'm just trying to get the static mesh to show up properly to start with, i'll worry about adding hardpoints and animations later.

Here are the textures:

The graph i made in substance designer:
sdgraph.jpg
If it's not clear enough, then here is how I made the textures. I fed a diffuse texture into a BitmapToMaterial node which split it into various output nodes (Normal, Specular, Gloss, Metal and Diffuse), then i created 3 RGBA slit nodes, which separates a color input into separate channels, then fed the red channel from the first two into the green and alpha inputs of a RGBA merge node and the blue input was connected to the B2M emissive output via the red channel of an RGBA splitter, like so:

sdgraphnormalbuild.jpg which gave me this: normalpluschannels.jpg The red and green channels are identical, and the blue channel is black, except for the white parts where I want the 'glow' to show up, this is basically how the Wiki says to structure a normal map.

The specular map is pretty much made the same way, with the metal gloss and specular outputs from the B2M node fed into channel split nodes, the blue outputs of which were then fed into the green, blue and alpha inputs of a merge node, as per the instructions on the wiki, which was then connected to the specular output node, like so:

sdgraphspecbuild.jpg which gave me this: specpluschannels.jpg and finally, the diffuse map: diffusetexture.jpg

If you need any more details, let me know.
 
Sent you a PM K-vald :)

- EDIT -

OK, I think i got it working, I just changed the texture and ran that through SD and it gave me a different set of textures, here's what it looks like now:

20170510225901_1.jpg


unfortunately i'm still getting the exploding mesh issue when rotating the camera, the mesh also disappears when viewed from a certain angle (behind i think), but i know back-face culling isn't on, so i don't know what's causing that.
 
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You get that because you have an animated mesh but without animations assigned in the .gfx/.asset file. If it is skinned to a joint it will be animated even if you don't have any animations there. You can either add animations or remove the joints/skinning.
 
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