Importing Cyan models

[Egon]

I wanted to import gazebo from Eder Delin or Tsogal, and treat it as an base for my own gazebo for Shell 126.

So I have importer up and running. Lucky for me, I was able to import Delin. I got meshes and materials. At first I though that I didn't imported textures,
but I have been told that despite the fact that I don't see textures in Blender they are applied to the object, and they will be visible in URU.

My problem is that importing object is just the beginning. I want to modify it, meaning: adding/merging vertices, meaning that I will have to set UV coordinates for new vertices.

Any tips on my problem?

P.S.
Option Game->Blender GLSL Materials is not working on my computer. I got error "GLSL is not supported with this graphic card"

[kaelisebonrai]

Actually... that's not what I said. =P

You need to reapply them to the mesh, not the object. else it won't even export.

They won't appear in the uv window, unless you set them there, as well, and this is default blender behaviour.

If you have working materials, then you should also have textures. however, with the default blender way of showing stuff in "textured" view (and as you cannot view Blender GLSL textures), you'll need to remove the vertex colours, perhaps not, but, it is likely. (this is not, however, a good solution.)

You can still view the UV co-ords, just like normal, in the uv window, with the object, in edit mode, and with the faces in question, selected.

[Egon]

You need to reapply them to the mesh, not the object. else it won't even export.

I'm guessing now that I would go to PRP Shop, and export needed textures. But how do I know which texutres go to which mesh (beside visaly comparing them in game and in PRP Shop)?

[andylegate]

If you import the Age using Blender 2.45 and the old Alcugs Plugin 0.5 then you will have a folder that says "TMP_Textures" and it will contain all the textures from the Age's texture prp file.

Not only will it do that, but you will be able to see the textures applied in Blender:



All you have to do once you've imported the Age is go down where I've circled with my blue arrow in the pic above and make sure you are set on "Textured"

While I've used some of the "new" importers....I've found that sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they never work......

So yah, the old Alcugs Plugin still has a place in my tool box as far as I'm concerned.

Hope this helps you.

[Egon]

Well, I have used this +Blender 2.45.

Can You provide me some link to Alcugs Plugin ?

EDIT: So you say this will work?

[kaelisebonrai]

If you import the Age using Blender 2.45 and the old Alcugs Plugin 0.5 then you will have a folder that says "TMP_Textures" and it will contain all the textures from the Age's texture prp file.

Not only will it do that, but you will be able to see the textures applied in Blender:



All you have to do once you've imported the Age is go down where I've circled with my blue arrow in the pic above and make sure you are set on "Textured"

While I've used some of the "new" importers....I've found that sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, sometimes they never work......

So yah, the old Alcugs Plugin still has a place in my tool box as far as I'm concerned.

Hope this helps you.

Andy, but to do that, you need to set blender glsl textures. it /works/ and it'll be in TMP_textures, as well. =)

The one you're using will also need to change the materials, etc, too. =P

I'd also, as always, recommend the importer listed as "more stable" (while, iirc, it lists it as older, it isn't).

none of the importers are built for direct export, and as much as I've often wanted this, it seems those doing the tools don't. :<

And, yes, Andy, that is what one should see, normally. Of course, Egon doesn't have a "good" enough graphics card, and thus, can't use blender glsl textures, to get the full effect. =)

[andylegate]

No, no. The importer that I'm using is the old Alcugs PyPRP plugin ver 0.5.

Here look at my picture again, and look at what the Game texture render is set at:



As you can see, I don't have Blender GLSL Materials set at all. Here is what it looks like if I do:



And here it is opened up in Blender 2.45. Which doesn't even had a "Blender GLSL Materials" option to set:



Here is what you'll get using the "Newer" importers that are located on the Wiki :



The textures themselves are not applied, only the shading. I've run into so many problems using the "Newer" importers (and I've tried 3 different versions over the years) that I always end up going back to good ol' Alcugs for importing.

Ah! Important note! I just remembered, as it's been so long. If you want to use the old Alcugs plugin to import, you will have to change one of the files. "alcconfig.py" at the beginning of the python file, you'll see a line about importing. You need to change it's value from "0" to "1" , else you will get an error when trying to import.

You can tell when you've imported with the old Alcugs PyPRP. Here's Er'cana imported with it. If you look in the layers, you'll find that things like the regions, colliders, etc are spread out over the different layers (instead of glopped all together in one layer like the newer importers do):



If you look in layer 3, you find the old "Book" system for setting up the Age files. Looks like one big box (the "book"), with several smaller boxes (the pages):



In any case, yah, my graphics card is most likely better as it's a nVidia GeForce 8500 GT, ePCI with 512 MB of memory. Not sure what Egon is using.

[kaelisebonrai]

I repeat, the old importer apparently does not import vertex colours. The new one *does*. (which is why you see what you do, with the hood). The texture data is there, and of this, I am 100% certain. (i have imported the hoods, and other locations, and they have all worked.)

Vertex colours are very nice, indeed, and this is why the newer one is better. This is also why blender glsl textures are good. The newer one gives you /better/ imported data, you guys just aren't looking in the right places.

I repeat, it does import textures, what you are looking at, Andy, is the vertex colours. The textures are under that.

Using the newer importer, import it, save it, then run it in the more recent blender. run "blender glsl textures" then take your screenshots, Andy. =)

[GPNMilano]

Andy is right in that textures are applied to the objects with the old Alcugs plugin (And so are Vertex Colors IIRC. The problem with the old importer was how it handled materials. This was back in the day when each object could only have one material upon export. So what the importer did was split all the objects up based upon materials. So for an object in Plasma that had say seven materials. You'd get seven seperate objects, each one with it's corresponding material. So take an ordinary linking book for example. Cyan's had four materials on them. So you'd litterally get four objects. The link panel, the sides of the book, and the two pages of the book.

When the importer was slowly updated with the exporter. Texture support on import was dropped by the way side in favor of keeping all the objects together as they are seen in Plasma.

As far as moving things to seperate layers, it's cool that the old importer did that, but support for it to dropped off and everything eventually got merged to one layer. Since the book aspect of the pyprp was switched to text files we didn't even need that layer anymore.

Kaelis:

Be happy that we have a version that imports as it is. When I joined the dev team it was cause of the decision to drop the import function from PyPRP. The dev team decided keeping up with fixing the many broken aspects of import was unnecessary. When I talked about this with the team at the time it was politely suggested that if I wanted the import function to continue that I could take it under my wing. Which is why the importer that is listed in the wiki still works

[andylegate]

I repeat, the old importer apparently does not import vertex colours. The new one *does*. (which is why you see what you do, with the hood). The texture data is there, and of this, I am 100% certain. (i have imported the hoods, and other locations, and they have all worked.)

Vertex colours are very nice, indeed, and this is why the newer one is better. This is also why blender glsl textures are good. The newer one gives you /better/ imported data, you guys just aren't looking in the right places.

I repeat, it does import textures, what you are looking at, Andy, is the vertex colours. The textures are under that.

Using the newer importer, import it, save it, then run it in the more recent blender. run "blender glsl textures" then take your screenshots, Andy. =)

Still not quite sure what you mean by the vertex colors not being there with the old importer. If you look at the pics above, you can see their affect in the Baron's Office, along with the textures.

With the newer importers, I can see the shaders, but only if I go to "Shaders" on the draw type (and then I don't see the textures as I showed above, only the colors), I can get the textures like you mentioned if I swap over to Blender GLSL, but the shader colors are missing:



I'm not sure why (except I just read what GPNMilano wrote).

And now, as it's early in the morning for me and I've only had 2 sips of coffee, I'm feeling a little bit like Chicken Little: "What are we talking about?"

heh....