Guild of Writers

In case anyone is interested, I'm back from my long hiatus and am here to help as it were with anyone that has questions about making Ages in 3ds Max.

I have made a LOT of tutorials on many of the basics and some advanced things for this area. Links to those tutorials are in my signature here, and over at the OpenUru wiki.

I also believe that some of them are here on the GoW Wiki, but not sure how to get to them, heh.

But if you still need help, you can PM me here and I'll do my best to help you out. You could also post in this thread, but I do believe that after a while it might be hard to navigate to.

I'll check a few times a day, when I have time here, plus I'll get a email notification if anyone PM's me.

In the mean time, I'll be pulling out my old Age Neolbah and doing some reworking on it. Plus some other stuff that I've had ideas for.

Can't promise I'll stay, but I'm all done playing Portal, Portal 2, Half-Life 2, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, Bioshock, Bioshock 2, Bioshock 3, .....uhm....Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2....and 3......well, you get the idea.

Good to see you back. Can you offer advice about Blender? I know nothing about Age Building, but I've been fooling around with Blender and can't seem to get much of anywhere.

Afalstein wrote:Good to see you back. Can you offer advice about Blender? I know nothing about Age Building, but I've been fooling around with Blender and can't seem to get much of anywhere.

The best advice I can give with using Blender (the interface of it), is to keep at it and do not give up.

When I first started to learn how to build Ages, the only tool available at that time was the GoW plugin for Blender, and this was for much earlier versions of Blender. Blender was unlike other 3D modeling programs I had messed with at the time, and it was very frustrating to try and get it to make what I wanted. Being very stubborn is what helped me. I kept trying over and over again, and it paid off. After a while, the user interface became 2nd nature, so that even today, I use Blender to make more complex models. I don't even have to think about what key to push to make something happen.

Now that said, that is with Blender versions 2.49 and earlier. Last year I downloaded the latest version of Blender and the newer versions are as foreign to me as the older versions were.

Since I use Cyan's plugin for Max to actually make Ages, this is not a problem for me, as I can still use the older versions of Blender to make the complex models I want, and port them over to Max, so there is no need for me to even learn how to use the newer versions of Blender at all.

However there are many Age Builders here that use Blender, or at least their used to be. Some of them should be able to help. If you're using Blender 2.49 and the GoW Plugin for that version, that I can help with. But if you're using newer versions, I'm afraid that I won't be much help.

But post your questions on here, I'm sure we can get you help.

I wanna try updating my Minkata soccer field and I can make things visible only at night using xAgeSDLBoolShowHide. however I can not figure out how to make thing like a set of standard lights visible only during the day,
Please help

xAgeSDLBoolShowHide doesn't disable light, I suppose...
You could try using the lights already in Minkata (as the ball does). This probably requires making the objects fully shaded and removing any lamp from your scene (although I don't know how you do it in Max).

Another way is putting each set of lights in a page, and using a Python script to (un)load each page.

Couldn't figure out Sirius's plan A or B but I do remember an old saying don't raise the bridge lower the river, instead of disabling the lights I could hide what the light shines on and use a darker texture for the nighttime version
If whats in the "Include" list of the lights has been hidden that kinda disables the light, I just might be able to update this one after all

Inspiration can come from any where

Thank you

I was thinking of setting up two versions of the lost Stonehenge similar to the two versions of Minkata.
Can you point me in the right direction to set up something like this from scratch?

Karkadann wrote:I wanna try updating my Minkata soccer field and I can make things visible only at night using xAgeSDLBoolShowHide. however I can not figure out how to make thing like a set of standard lights visible only during the day,
Please help

xAgeSDLBoolShowHide. isn't the script you want to use. You want to use xAgeSDLBoolRespond. Then you want to animate the color of the light so it goes from off to on and back to off. Give the animations names and the light to responders. One that turns it on, the other turning it off. Those are the responders that xAgeSDLBoolRespond will call.

thanks I'll give that a try. It should be easer then making two of everything

Hi andylegate!

Don't know if you are still monitoring this site but I'll give it a shot.

I am trying yo get xFogSet to work in my age without success. Everything is set up just like you have it in your tutorial for 3ds max but no fog shows up in my age. karkadann and others fave tried to help but still nothing. Any ideas?

I'm using 3ds max 8.