Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here.

STiFU on 22/10/2005 at 09:58

How can i make normal brushes invisible? I managed it with smeshes, but i tried the same (and many other things) with normal brushes, but it didnt work... I want to make a collision hull for a scaled static mesh. Clicking the Add special brush button doesnt seem to work, too...

Ziemanskye on 22/10/2005 at 10:33

Cover it in a texture called BF.
It doesn't render, but does collide, so that ought to be invisible enough for a collision hull.
And if the "Add Special Brush doesn't work, most of the properties can be set afterwards anyway (Make the brush, right click it, play with the menu - I'd suggest making it semi-solid for a collision brush - /then/ compile it, you'll probably see the wireframe of it change colour)

STiFU on 22/10/2005 at 10:49

yes the color changed, but it was still visible in the fleshrenderer AND ingame. But ill try your texturing method.

..Works fine! You just have to edit the texture to not cast shadows and everything works fine! You rock! :D thx

Bardic on 28/10/2005 at 09:13

SneaksieDave

Quote:

I found that when I used fake backdrop, any lights within the skybox were counted toward total lights for a scene. Or something like that - because I had, say, 6 lights in a scene, and only 3 of them affected the light gem. Why? Because the skybox had multiple lights, so I think it was breaking some limitation on lights, somewhere (if one exists - it's the only reason I could think of at the time). When I changed the surfaces NOT to be fake backdrop, and instead just used the face texture, suddenly it appeared correctly as a skybox AND all the lights worked properly.

I was looking through things and remembered your post. In the Level Info properties: ZoneInfo-> you have

MaxLightCount=6
MinLightCount=6

Changing those might make a difference with skyzone lights. If you had a reason to need to.

SneaksieDave on 28/10/2005 at 17:41

Aha, cool. :) I knew I'd seen something like that somewhere. Weird, I guess the sky zone lights count toward a scene with sky, or at least in some semi-buggy way (since the lights actually lit, but didn't affect the lightgem).

Ziemanskye on 28/10/2005 at 19:57

Has anyone got custom particles to work? I mean the textures rather than customised emitters?

I can get it to work in the editor, but it screws up when it goes into the game for some reason - like it just throws away the alpha channel. I've tried inverting the image, the alpha, having one and not...

After a lot of faffing about, I got it to work in the editor again, but it still doesn't load right in the game.

lamadorsa on 3/11/2005 at 02:29

How do i scale a static mesh , a window for example ?
thx.

Crispy on 3/11/2005 at 03:34

Change the property Render->DrawScale. A value of 1.0 is normal size, 0.5 is half size, etc.

BUT - this won't scale the size of the collision hull. So you could end up with an invisible barrier surrounding your object (if you scale it down), or an object that can be partially walked into (if you scale it up). So it's probably a good idea to turn off collisions on that object. If you need it to collide with things, put in invisible BSP or static meshes that are the desired size, to fake it.

lamadorsa on 3/11/2005 at 04:23

thank you Crispy, is it possible to non-uniformally scale the mesh ?
and another question, i need to make a doorway for a door that is rounded on top, is there an easy way to create this doorway so that it will stick up well with the rounded door ? or do i need to create a spherical brush, edit its vertex to get it to the good rounded shape that will create the doorway i want ?
thx again.

Crispy on 3/11/2005 at 05:09

Nope, sorry - I don't believe non-uniform scaling is possible. Not without creating custom meshes, for which you need 3ds max 5.1. (And I mean the exact version 5.1 - 3ds max 5 won't work, and neither will 3ds max 6.)

There are static meshes you can use for the archways over rounded doors. Some of them have bits of wall attached; rather than trying to get the texture on the BSP wall to match the static mesh, which is a losing battle, I find it's best to just put the static mesh's wall pieces inside the actual wall so they're not seen. (You will need to use vertex editing to subtract BSP from inside the doorframe, though. Be careful with vertex editing - it's so easy to cause BSP holes in this engine that it's not funny.)