Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen,
First things first: I'm new to this board, so hi all
. Some of you may already have spotted me over at the old M6 forum now and then.
I'm still in the slow process of creating an orbiter add-on vessel, though things have recently picked up a faster pace. Currently, I'm having a serious problem converting my mesh to .msh (then again, I may be considered a bloody newbie at 3d modeling, so forgive my ignorance).
I'm using Anim8or to model my vessel and export to 3ds. Then I convert to .msh via 3ds2msh. I'm just afraid my groups and coordinates get messed up somewhere in the process:
1. I'm currently working with 2 items in Anim8or, a core vehicle mesh and a nosecone mesh. As I understand it, they are supposed to become 2 groups in the msh file, enabling me to do a nosecone animation via spacecraft3. However, I'm ending up with 4 groups on conversion. From a quick glance through the .msh-file, it appears each existing combination of items and materials is considered a seperate group. 3 materials in total, all 3 of them used on the core mesh and 1 material used on the nose cone mesh result in 4 groups. Feels a bit awkwardish and untidy, and I'm not sure if it may be connected to the second, probably worse problem:
2. In the resulting .msh-file, the coodinate system appears to be centered in the geometric center of the mesh rather than the point it used to be in Anim8or (I realized that playing around with touch-down point offsets). If I'm not mistaken, orbiter also interprets its coordinate origin as the center of gravity of that vessel, but I plain and easy want it to be closer to the bottom of the vehicle... In Anim8or, world & screen coordinates are centered at my desired center of mass, the core vehicle's object coordinates are also centered there, and the nose cone's object coordinates are centered at the point where I want to apply a rotation animation. Still, in Orbiter, I end up with the origin of my coordinates right in the middle of the vehicle.
Forgive me the stupid question, but am I doing something blatantly wrong here? Any suggestions are welcome.
~peace
First things first: I'm new to this board, so hi all
. Some of you may already have spotted me over at the old M6 forum now and then.I'm still in the slow process of creating an orbiter add-on vessel, though things have recently picked up a faster pace. Currently, I'm having a serious problem converting my mesh to .msh (then again, I may be considered a bloody newbie at 3d modeling, so forgive my ignorance
).I'm using Anim8or to model my vessel and export to 3ds. Then I convert to .msh via 3ds2msh. I'm just afraid my groups and coordinates get messed up somewhere in the process:
1. I'm currently working with 2 items in Anim8or, a core vehicle mesh and a nosecone mesh. As I understand it, they are supposed to become 2 groups in the msh file, enabling me to do a nosecone animation via spacecraft3. However, I'm ending up with 4 groups on conversion. From a quick glance through the .msh-file, it appears each existing combination of items and materials is considered a seperate group. 3 materials in total, all 3 of them used on the core mesh and 1 material used on the nose cone mesh result in 4 groups. Feels a bit awkwardish and untidy, and I'm not sure if it may be connected to the second, probably worse problem:
2. In the resulting .msh-file, the coodinate system appears to be centered in the geometric center of the mesh rather than the point it used to be in Anim8or (I realized that playing around with touch-down point offsets). If I'm not mistaken, orbiter also interprets its coordinate origin as the center of gravity of that vessel, but I plain and easy want it to be closer to the bottom of the vehicle... In Anim8or, world & screen coordinates are centered at my desired center of mass, the core vehicle's object coordinates are also centered there, and the nose cone's object coordinates are centered at the point where I want to apply a rotation animation. Still, in Orbiter, I end up with the origin of my coordinates right in the middle of the vehicle.
Forgive me the stupid question, but am I doing something blatantly wrong here? Any suggestions are welcome.
~peace
.
