BAT - Troubleshooting & General Discussion

[Sky Guy 163]

Okay well, I can't seem to even get into preview renders. you go to the little hammer and the select BAT right?) well i can't find Bat under the options, it just gives me a bunch of utilities. please help Thanks

Oh and i don't know if this would effect the texturing issue, but my roof is a box that i moved the veticies around to make it slope

[Jasoncw 11,840]

You need to open Gmax through the BAT icon/shortcut, not through the Gmax shortcut.

Yes, that's why you need to add a UVW Map.

[Sky Guy 163]

Ugh stupid page flip bug... anyway thanks Jason i got that part working

When I go into the UVW map, what do i do. It just gives me a ton of options like: planar, sphereical, box, face etc.

Oh and thanks for putting up with me

[Jasoncw 11,840]

The shapes are the geometry how your texture will be deformed to the object. You want to pick the shape that is the closest to your object, or one that gives the best looking results.

The rest are the dimensions of the shape, some options for the orientation of the shape, and a few more options relating to the UVW Map.

So if you have a texture that is 500x500 pixels, and you give it a planar UVW Map of 4x4 meters, then your 500x500 pixel image will be 4x4 meters on the object.

[SimHoTToDDy 2,938]

Well I'm glad you got that straightened out. Jason basically covered it, though your best way to learn is to try the options that are in there and see for your self what they do so you know how and when to adjust things when the time comes.

As far as textures go, they are what you make of them. Here is what I mean:

You may look through thousands of pictures looking for the right texture, when in reality you could make what you need with any number of them. To go with the picture you posted, I looked though my texture collection (most of which came from CG ) and it was no surprise that I didn't find one that matched exactly. But you have to remember you are just looking for a texture (which is just the pattern that you are aiming to represent)

NOTE: these are crudely done, extremely rough, 30 second jobs in PS for illustrative reasons only (So I don't want to hear it from you who know better!!!)

So, although they may not look like they would work I found this:

No, that won't do at all! That doesn't match in the slightest dose it? Well, its just a matter of perspective. Change a few simple settings (contrast, brightness, saturation , and hue) we get something that goes with your picture much better.

adjust the same texture again and you get another one from your picture.

For an even better example, here is one that resembles the third texture. "But that looks nothing like it" you might say, but you have to look deeper than that.

But you see, it doesn't have to look just like it, because we can make it look the way we want. I just did the same steps as the one before.

Still no good? Well, there is much more still to be done. Some of the less barbaric image manipulation that refines something like this is work with the crop tool, paintbrush, burn/doge (for photoshop), adding layers for grime, etc. Simply pick out the part you want and go from there.

Now, I would not recommend using these by any means, they are rather crudely done just to give you an idea of the control you have over what you are doing here. Don't let the unavailability of the perfect texture get in the way of your BATing, simply make your own perfect texture.

All you need is a program to edit the texture ( GIMP is a really good free alternative to PS I have heard) and the general idea of what you want it to look like.

Hope you get the idea and this helps you out. If you have questions about editing the textures, there are lots of people here to help with that too,

-Todd

[Sky Guy 163]

Wow, Thanks guys. I tried it out, but when i change the geometry and apply the texture, nothing changes though- am i doing something wrong?

@ SimHoTToDDy: Thanks for the idea, i'll start working on it (and for the record, those textures look fine to me!)

Once again thanks for all the help i am getting

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Can you post an image?

[Sky Guy 163]

Here is a picture (in casse your wondering it is one of frogfaces houses that i am editing for my CJ)

You can see that the globes on the fence and the roof are still blank

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Can you do a preview render?

[Sky Guy 163]

Thanks to you, yes i can

[Jasoncw 11,840]

hmm, well, it's one of the three things that autovino posted.

[Sky Guy 163]

Okay, when i move half of the roof away, i can see the textures on the side of it (the orange), but not on the slope, and no matter what geometry i choose, it just edits the sides.

[autoVino 26]

I'm assuming that you created that roof via poly (or mesh) editing, because that seems to create the problem that you have in gmax. Make sure that you apply the texture to the whole object (not just a plane in the edit mesh or poly) and make sure that the mapping modifier is applied to the whole object (not just a single plane in the edit mesh or poly) and is set to the shape that best matches your roof (likely box with the gizmo rotated to fit the roof).

[Jasoncw 11,840]

ahhh, yeah, I bet that's the problem.

[Sky Guy 163]

Okay, but how do i make sure that i have the whole roof selected?

[autoVino 26]

Get out of the poly-select mode or select all the polys. Poly select mode toggled as on is depicted as a small square beside the name of the modifier (in this case edit poly or uv mapping). When off there is no red square. Other modes also have their corresponding icons that toggle on and off. I think by clicking the red square either in the modifier stack or in the modifier options should toggle it on and off.

[Sky Guy 163]

Yah! I finally got it to work, I filled in the lightbulbs next to material, then went into modifiers> surface> materials and it showed up!

Thanks guys for all the help, lets cross our fingers that it exports right!!!

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Hey guys, just a quick question...

Is there a way to quickly 'offset' shapes in Max, similar to the way it's done in AutoCAD.

Say for instance, I have an irregular shape like this, and I want to create a new shape that will fit perfectly inside it, with the same offset distance around the entire thing, how would I do that?

(How do I make the red line?)

[SimFox 802]

Yes there is.

I assume that your shape is a spline. In that case you can select spline sub-object and scroll down in Geometry Roll-out till you see the Outline option. Play with it. the actual direction of the offset would depend on the direction of you spline. Anyway you can always substitute negative value to change it.

If your thing isn't a spline no more, you can use Push modifier...

[Jasoncw 11,840]

ahhh, thanks. Good stuff to know.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Yea, thanks for that Simfox.  Very cool little feature, I should have spotted that.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Uh, sorry to double post... trying to improve my modeling skills...

I'm at a curtail part of an upcoming BAT, and I've got stuck on this simple little thing, it's got me totally stumped.

I need to align the ends of these horizontal lines - the red points - (in the front view) to a path as you can see below, but because this path has no points to snap onto, it's surprisingly difficult.

I've tried messing around with align, and then the spacing tool, but still no luck. How would this be done? I need to move these lines only on the X axis until the ends just touch my path. btw, just eyeballing it like I usually would won't work in this situation.

Thanks if you can help me out.

[Odainsaker 2,134]

If these lines are in the form of splines, one method you can do is to extend the parallel line towards the right all the way past the the curved line such that in this viewport they overlap. Within the spline sub-object menu should be a button called "Trim." When the "Trim" button is activated, you can click on those portions of the spline you do not wish to keep, and it will remove any portion of the spline up to any intersection or overlap with any other spline portion or vertice within the current viewport, creating new vertices where needed. Uh, it makes more clear sense when trying it out, hehe

Similarly, if the left ends of the parallel lines need to follow a matching curve, you can just move or clone the existing curve to the left, extend your parallel lines a bit to the left so that they overlap the curve and give something to easily trim away, and use the "Trim" tool again to cut down the unwanted extensions. There are likely other ways of doing things like this, but for your given example, this would be the easiest way.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

wow! That will be very useful! I really ought to start learning this stuff.

[Cockatoo 2,256]

Thanks Odainsaker. There was some stuff you forgot to mention... but after I looked it up on Google, I got it to work. All the spines had to be merged into one object before trim would work.

But trim was the right answer, so thanks.

[Xyloxadoria 1,099]

I exported a BAT 5 diffrent times and every sigle time i did i had FSH problems as you can see from the in game picture below one of the fsh files on mt model is being replaced. The s3d files are there and i know that its working fine, but it has fsh files from other models replacing what should be from this model. What do i have to do to fix this?

[De Ja Vu 117]

hI!

While trying to istall the BAT I get this:

"gMax from discreet does not appear to be istalled. You must downlaod and install gMax from http://www.discreet.com/products/gmax before you can istall and use BAT. "

The problem is that I already have gMax installed on my computer :S

....what should I do to get BAT?

-Dejavu

[Jasoncw 11,840]

xyloxadoria:  Merge your current scene into a new scene, and export from the new scene.  Every time you export from the same scene, a certain number in the ID range (for the .FSH files) gets higher, and eventually the number will increase into the range of the Maxis .FSH files. 

For future reference though, exporting from a fresh scene solves most export related problems.

De Ja Vu:  I guess double check that you have Gmax properly installed.  I don't really know. 

[De Ja Vu 117]

No it didn't work...

Tryed that before...

Anyway the main reason I wanted to get BAT is because I wanted to texture a 3D model.

I just don't know what I'm doing wrong in gMax:

Here is the 3D model (It's from sketchUp and it's a single polygon:

But when I apply the textures it turns out like this:

Is there any way to put textures on a single surface? Possibly more than one texture...

EDIT: Here are 2 pictures of how I want it to be textured (from SketchUp) :

https://i381.photobucket.com/albums/oo257/Dejavu2182/zhsga.jpg

https://s381.photobucket.com/albums/oo257/Dejavu2182/?action=view&current=gaqhaugf.jpg

Thank you!

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Right click on your object, and convert it into an editable polygon.

From there, select one of the faces of the polygon. (check the tutorials in the omnibus for more instruction)

In the material editor, click and drag the material on to that face, and it will only apply it to that face.

But the method you're using is going to result in a god awful looking BAT. I'm sure you've seen enough of these types of BATs on the STEX to know this. You'll need to actually model the walls, window frames, etc. You can only get away with using textures (instead of modeling) on fine details.