Questions about importing Meshes and Textures

[electroglyph]

I have been building objects in Rhino and having good luck importing them to scale. I draw the objects doors etc. to fit a 6 foot avitar. I make a big sphere with up to a 1000 ft radius around the objects. I import to blender with the clamp scale set to the same size as the sphere. This can be dragged to where I want it then deselected. If I reselect the sphere and delete it I can drop a building with all the textures and scales set for the game. I've done three or four with scales and my avitar always matches the 6 ft scales I build with the meshes.

I have a couple of problems with this method. The clamp scale in blender has a 1000ft max. Is there any way to increase this if I want to do an entire age larger than 1000ft?

I have tried mapping schemes not available in blender. PNG textures work great but BMP textures were half transparent. What textures can I use that work in blender and the game?

[electroglyph]

You can see in the far image the cables and floating stones show through the funnel like structure. These are meshes that were textured with bmp images. My base textures are up to 25mb and the biggest part of the age files.

[Robert The Rebuilder]

That's quite an interesting world you've created, Electroglyph!

I have a couple of problems with this method. The clamp scale in blender has a 1000ft max. Is there any way to increase this if I want to do an entire age larger than 1000ft?

Call up the View Properties dialog (View -> View Properties), then set Clip End to something large, like 2000. Now you can zoom out and see larger scaled objects.

I have tried mapping schemes not available in blender. PNG textures work great but BMP textures were half transparent. What textures can I use that work in blender and the game?

My preference is to use PNG files, since they can store regular and transparent images, plus they are much smaller than BMP files.

[Paradox]

TGA is a great format for textures, it's lossless, fairly compressed, and supports alpha. Also it's handled very well by Blender and GIMP.

[electroglyph]

Actually the view properties dialog just controls depth clipping. There isn't a front panel to change the export properties. I poked around in python and figured it out however. Here's how to change the import clamp defaults in blender.

Go to the directory C:\program files\blender\.blender\scripts\
Go down through the directory till you find the file import_obj.py
Right click on the file and click on the choice under open called Edit with IDLE
(this is an editor that loads with python. It takes about a minute to open so be patient!)
Use the find command in the editor to find the word clamp or scale till you reach this line under the get user options.

Add another zero (or two) to the 1000.0 to increase the scale, or just type whatever bigger number you want. This value seems to be arbitrary although you will probably eventually choke the program if you make it billions.
Save the py file and close IDLE.
You should now be able to import obj fiiles up to the size you set for the clamp scale.