A few more problems with shells

[Atheni33]

I’ve been able to export most of my Aquarium into Aura Pahts but I’m having problems and I need help..

My textures are doing weird things such as texturing the inside of an object vs the outside. Tilling vs wrapping. For example I made some temporary steps to explore the office area and I notice the texture was inverted. Another words they seemed to be wrapped inside the step vs outside, I have no idea how that happened. I also notice that the texture on the outside of the wall wouldn’t render and I could see through the structure, but once entered everything was 'solid'. But I had the reverse problem with the second structure, the outside was solid but when I went inside it was completely transparent and I could see through the walls. I compared the two structures on how I placed the texture and it appeared identical. I did read the forum and I have tried fixing the broken paths and cleaning out the Pahts_tex Chache and all my objects have the correct string number, but nothing changed. I knew there must have been a problem with the way the texture was being wrapped and I thought if I extrude the walls that would force blender to double up on the texture. It worked..but I know it also multiplies the number of faces which is not efficient.

Far as the tiling problem I decided trying different ways of UV wrapping and selected project from view (bounds) and then UV wrapped and it did removed the tilling..I don’t know why. Again I may not want to be limited to wrap an object this way. Can I just choose to tile or not to tile when UV wrapping....lol I still haven’t been able to export a texture cylinder or a plane even using my little tricks. I know they are there because I've walked my avatar on them their just invisible. *sigh*

And lastly I also have a collision issue with two of my shells. I know I deleted everything out of all the shells and exported them into Aura before building but two of the shells floors (not seen) seem to be there. I am pretty sure there is no objects there. The only thing I did notice is the shell numbers are still hovering above. Is it possible to have select all objects, delete them and still have the floor collision still functioning? If so how do I remove it and the shell numbers?

[Jojon]

By default, the faces can only be seen from one direction. This is to provide the 3D engine with one easy way to sort away stuff you won't see anyway, like the opposite side of a wall, so that it doesn't have to waste computing resources drawing it. The side that is drawn, is indicated by its "normal" - simply its facing direction, which you can display in Blender, by marking the Buttons->Editing/MeshToolsMore/DrawNormals button. The normals will be shown as a light blue line, protuding from the centre of each face, the length of which can be set using the "NSize" number box above the "DrawNormals" button.
Also, in textured display mode, Blender will show faces only in their normal direction, just as Uru does.

To change the facing direction of a number of faces; select them and hit [w] key, select FlipNormals from the menu that pops up.


If you want a texture to cover the whole object, rather than tile; scale the UVmap up until it does. Select all faces, then select all vertices in the UV/Image editor and hit [s] key to scale, just like you would in a 3D view. Note that you can edit the map freely - it's not unwrap-and-then-you're-stuck-with-what-you-got.


The collision meshes in your Ahra Pahts shell are in Layer two. In Blender you can elect to draw things on different layers - like, say you had a drawing of a house and then drew the plumbing for the house on a transparent film that you overlay on top of the drawing, leaving the base drawing untouched, or like cel animation, where each animator draws his character frame on a transparent cel, which is then put on top of the background. This makes it easy to exclude stuff from being shown in the editor, at any time.
To select which layer(s) to view; use the array of unmarked little buttons in the 3D view toolbar. Holding down shift while clicking a button multiselects in a familiar manner.
There is a similar button array among the object buttons, for selecting which layer(s) selected object(s) appears on.

[Atheni33]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh..now I get it!! I read about the normals somewhere but had no idea where to look for them. Thanks for the quick reply Jojon I was getting so frustrated with this build. Your explanation on how and why things work a particularly way makes perfect sense, now I don't feel so lost.

[Atheni33]

I was doing so well..three months with out any problems. I have been working a lot on my shell and tonight out of no where I get this 'memory error' while exporting the shell. It appears to be at the end of the export because I can see blender was trying to save the shell. I have no idea what the error could mean. I actually deleted a lot objects so it wasn't larger than any of my other exports, and I don't have any other programs running.

[Christian Walther]

Looks like it's choking on one of your exported files trying to compute its checksum. What are the sizes of your .prp files (and maybe .age, .fni, etc. as well, just to make sure one wasn't inflated to a humongous size by some bug)?

Reading the whole files into memory in one lump doesn't seem like a particularly good idea to me (although I haven't had any problems with it so far). I'll see if I can improve that if you give me a bit of time.

[Atheni33]

I'm not sure what the limits are for the shells but I have three I'm working on as one large build. The .age and .fni files are just 1 KB. The last .prp file I try to export was 35,604 kb. And it's only 25% done. Maybe this should be in an age instead, because It's only going to get more detailed and I still have to animate the aquatic life. I also was considering packing up what I had now and having GOM look at it. It might be easier to check it for problems in stages before it get so big. If you can figure it out that would be great also! Any help is welcome because I'm pretty lost when it comes to the technical stuff.

[Christian Walther]

OK, nothing out of the ordinary.

Can you try downloading http://svn.guildofwriters.com/pyprp/contrib/CWalther/stable/src/prp_MFSGen.py (use right-click and Save As or the like) and substituting it for the file of the same name in your C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts folder?

[Dot]

I also was considering packing up what I had now and having GOM look at it. It might be easier to check it for problems in stages before it get so big. If you can figure it out that would be great also! Any help is welcome because I'm pretty lost when it comes to the technical stuff.

GoMa would love to help test out your shell, Atheni. We can set up a WIP subforum on the GoMa site for you when you are ready -- just let us know!

[Atheni33]

Christian - I down loaded the prp file and it works fine now..no more memory errors. Thanx!

Dot - That would be so helpful if GoMa check my shell !! I'm going to clean it up a bit before sending the first phase through. Still really rough and I'm a little insecure about my creation. My job slows down this time of year so my goal is to work on the build everyday for the next couple of weeks so I'll be in touch.

[Christian Walther]

I down loaded the prp file and it works fine now..no more memory errors.

Cool. In that case, I recommend that change (r349) to be merged into the trunk, if one of the developers is listening.