Celestia Forums

Oh sweet you found the Madman models!
If you need any help getting those converted let me know.

It's actually more often the faces on the models are facing the wrong way.
I have found that in alot of models from the web, you have to flip some of the faces, except of course Bridge Commander models.

Tim

...What I find for some reason is that in cmodview I can't see the textures in jpg format.

A reason could be that because 3DS format hold the 8+3 namefile, an assigned texture named, to say, "fronthull.jpg" will be renamed as assigned "fronthu~1.jpg" in seat of 3DS construction. The conversion in CMOD, because it doesn't have such limitation, will truncate the name like is it, and it will not find such texture because it is in search of assigned "fronthu~1.jpg" instead of assigned "fronthull.jpg".

pla879, take a look here and download the "3DS to CMOD converter for Windows". It convert the 3DS to CMOD in ASCII form, which is editable through a plain text editor. That can helping in texture's mapping because you can manually edit its text' strings. The CMODview works only in binary and it is as good as viewer for the final step, when the model is ought for finished and need small filesize output (it read the same CMOD too, right? ).

Hi pla879, forgive partially what I've said. Because I never use JPG, I was unable to find that with JPG texture the CMODviewer doesn't seem to work at all. After some tests, it doesn't "see" JPG neither when I do load into it a 3DS model converted before in CMOD ASCII format nor whether to such a converted model I do assign another JPG texture. Only with PNG and DDS it seems to work. Anyhow, the truncation of the 3DS texture's filename to 8+3 is done automatically by Autodesk which does rename even the texture to match such limitatio; other 3D modelers doesn't make so with the 3DS format and the length of the name is correct. If wasn't be for such (bug?) of the CMODviewer it could be also that one would have exported from MAX to 3DS with the textures' filenames truncated and then would have shipped the model with the original, length named textures.

As for OBJ, each OBJ mesh must be correctly UV mapped (planar, spherical etc.). be sure also that the normal of the OBJ be correct because 3DS doesn't store normals but if one are inward and other are outward, then 3DS goes crazy (flips).