QUICK AND DIRTY MAYA HW2 SHIP EXPORT TUTORIAL


I assume that you set up maya to the point that you can export the RDN sample ships (that is the topic of another tutorial)

I also assume that you have the following:

at least 1 continuous mesh that will be your LOD0 mesh

a single PSD file made correctly within the relic specifications

IE correctly trimmed, with correctly named layers
(I will make another tutorial for this)
( no bigger than 1024x1024 usually but must be powers of two)

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you do not have to have engine glow meshes or lod meshes, however they are useful.

try to make sure your meshes are one object

for example the LOD0 mesh should be one object, the goblins should be cobined into one object
the engine glow layers shoudl be each one object (usually three layers are sufficient)

the collison mesh can be a copy of any of the LOD meshes, however it MUST BE ONE OBJECT ( I usually use the LOD0)

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first a few notes about maya.

maya's interface is WEIRD, however it is relativly efficient.

most everything can be accessed by right clicking on the object and going through the menu that pops up

one of the features that is really annoying at first is decent camera controls, however the system with hot keys makes a lot of sense.

to pan around (up down left right) in hypergraph or view ports hold down the alt key and use the middle mouse button

to zoom in and out use the alt key + the right mouse button

to rotate the view in the perspective window use the left button.

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load up maya and open the template.ma file (this will provide you with over 50 weapon hard points 30 navlights, 30 effect points and multiple repair and capture points


the three windows on top will be useful later, but you can minimize them for now.
go to the file menu and select import. we will now get all of the mesh objects into maya

path to the directory your models are in and hit import (I think .OBJ files work the best)


repeat this for every mesh that you want to include in this ship (goblins, collison, lods, engine meshes)
once you are done you can pan around and rotate your model to make sure everything has imported
(objects like collision meshes and lods will overlap, we will discuss how to see these in a bit)

when you are satisfied that you have imported all of the objects in the ship goto window->hypergraph or open the window labelled hypergraph on the bottom of the screen.


hypergraph assigns the heirarchial relationships between objects in the scene. Relic uses this system to allow for subsystems and hardpoints.
use the same ALT+mouse keys to navigate inside of hypergraph and find the objects you have just imported, they should be to the upper right of the long list of hardpoints. you can select an object by clicking on it and it will highlight green in the viewport (use this to check if all the objects are there) if you right click on the object you can rename the object, show the object in the viewport, hide the object in the viewports, or do other things that don't really relate to ship exporting)

this next step is CRUCIAL to the ship exporting

all of the objects that will be in LOD0 (highest detail) will need to be named with the suffix _LOD0
similarly for all of the less detailed LODs they MUST be named with the suffix _LOD1, _LOD2, etc
(IE HULL_LOD0, HULL_LOD1, BRIDGE_LOD0, BRIDGE_LOD1)

the collision mesh MUST be prefixed with CM_ (IE CM_HULL)

engine glows MUST be named engineGlow0, engineGlow1, engineGlow2 (the lowest number being the innermost mesh)

goblins can either be named as GOBLINS or suffixed with _GOB (contraty to relic I thing only one goblin mesh is practical)

objects in hypergraph can be moved by left clicking on them to select and then click and drag on the middle mouse button to move them to the parent node then release the button to complete the move. in this case all the meshes will go under the ROOT node (the one with all the hardpoints, middle mouse drag the hypergraph entries one by one to the top node of the root called Root) except for the engineglows. these will need to be dragged to the enginenozzle hardpoint (about 20 entries down after the markers and capture points) the engine glows should now be under the enginenozzle and the rest of the meshes should be at the bottom of the list.

now we need to clean this mess up, we are going to assign the meshes to layers so that it is more organized go to window->relationship editors->display layers or click on the relationship editor box you minimized earlier

to me the inteface of this dialogue is STUPID however it does make our life easier find and expand the root node by clicking the + sign next to it. scroll down and find your objects

on the left side select the layer you want to place the object into on the right side select the object you want to put in that layer, now middle mouse drag the object on the right to the layer on the left (sometimes it works just by clicking, I think it is buggy)

CM is for collison meshes
engine is for engine glows
goblins is for the goblins
LOD# is for the lod meshes
ship is for the LOD0 mesh
paths is for docking paths (another tutorial)

for the engine glows you will have to find the enginenozzle node on the right and expand it and then add the objects to the layer

once you have assigned everything to its layers you can minimize this
you will find that the collision mesh and engine glows have disapearred , they are set to invisible
(NEED TO PUT MORE INFO HERE)
minimize the relationship editor.

now we need to texture the ships. goto window->rendering editors->hypershade or open the hypershade window from earlier.

there may be other material entries in the shader viewer (navigate with ALT+mouse) you can delete all but what is shown below (the HW2 shader is the most important) by selecting it with the left mouse button and hitting delete.

select the HW2 shader. click on the button pointed to by the arrow above to select the texture map for your ship (alternativly you can go a tab over and the map will show up and click on it to get to the same dialogue)

(MORE INFO ON MULTIPLE TEXTURES)
click on the folder icon on the right (attribute editor window) to bring up the file dialogue path to the directory your PSD is in. and select "best guess" as the file type.now your PSD should appear, select it and the shader should look somewhat similar.

now minimize hypershade and go back to hypergraph
select the mesh you want to texture (it may help to hide some of the meshes temporarily) right click on the mesh in the viewport and at the bottom of the menu select materials->assign existing material->HW2Shader

that mesh should be now textured (there may be some weirdness with the mesh faces disapearing but the texture should map as it did in the other modelling program) using hypergraphs show and hide, apply the texture to the rest of the objects (LODS + goblins)

when you are done make sure all of your lods and goblins are showing (don't worry about the collision mesh and engine glows they don't need textures or to be displayed)

next we neeed to position the hard points

go to hypergraph and select a hard point you want to move on the right, the attribute panel allows you to accurately position the hardpoint and specify rotation.


go to the viewports and find the green highlighted 'L' shape
if you want to manually move or rotate the hard point (inaccurately) you can use the move and rotate tools. DO NOT use the scale tool for any reason, this causes weird errors




navlights allow for some attributes to be set
select a nav light in the hypergraph and then look at the attribute viewer on the right and click on 'extra attributes'

here you can change the navlight settings
the most important are
RGB: sets the color
size: glow size in meters
frequency: how fast it blinks

(MORE INFO HERE)



minimize all of the windows and check to see if everything is looks allright

now you can export

goto file->export all and open up the dialogue


path to the (hw2)/data/ships/shipname/ directory where you want the hod file and put in the .hod name

hit export


the file will take at least a minute to write out and should end without any ERRORs (check the output window for specifics)

refer to the export errors page if you do get any

(will be posted shortly, is on discussion thread however)

don't forget to save often, I prefer to save as .mb files.