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Hey guys, i've finished modelling a ship and i wanted to pass it to milk to export into MDL... the only problem being...

I model using Blender, and its 3ds exporting script is bugged so it doesn't work (creates unreadable files). i tried Xsi but milk crashes when it tries to load it.
I tried LWO but milk says he can't import LWOs from versions 6.5x... did any of you model using blender and how the hell were you able to export it so you could use it in milk???

Need a bit of help there... or i won't be able to try it out... a pain since it took me days to complete it...

.obj's?

post the file, and I'll see what I can do.

Also ask MadP/Compellor about making a .mdl using the original dev tools and skipping milkshape altogether.

as long as is possible i'd love skipping milk... tho i want to know, are milkshape joints blender's armatures? Also, i noticed whenever i export the name of my object (s) doesn't get saved, which is a problem, overall, since the model should keep the original names to identify the cvh...

There were some problems I never solved with the dev tools. You can create models that work ingame, but the texture and model become one file, so you can't use text mdl's to have alternate textures, or png textures - I can't remember if there were other issues with it. Also, while the dev tools will create a hitbox for you, it doesn't always do a good job, and you have to specify the location of lights, gunmounts, etc. with cubes or pyramids. The process is supposed to remove the geometry, but sometimes it doesn't work, so you end up with pyramids where the blinking lights should be. The Rix expansion (ss97) is an excellent example of multiple things going wrong - someone really needs to fix that. I suppose I should at some point.

You can create your own hitboxes instead of letting the dev tools do it for you, but I don't know of any way around the texture issue, and in the end I think I ended up setting some of my missile mounts manually (the CVH is a text file). I suppose you could do the CVH in Milkshape and the mdl with the dev tools, but that doesn't solve the importing issue. Also, while Milkshape will import MDLs it makes, or that were made by Microsoft, it won't import the ones made using the dev tools. Presumably Microsoft had a slightly different version of the dev tools, or there's some trick to them that we're missing.

I haven't experimented with it much but as Adaven said .obj is worth a try.

probably obj is good enough... at least it saves materials and uv-map... textures are still out of the picture but it may be me having no clue about milk. I think i'll just model the hitboxes in blender myself, it's just a matter of later object/group naming, nothing much ( except milk still hates importing the original object names), and i think i'll add joints in it too cause it seems i've got problems importing them in milk also...

In milk, have you tried hitting edit>refresh texture? Sometimes it doesn't take on load for some reason.

In Blender, make sure you're writing an MTL file on export. Also, when exporting try playing with the 'grouping' options. Having only "material groups" selected seems to work reasonably well for retaining object names.

One more note - I haven't played with it much, so I'm not sure how good a job Milkshape does exporting CVH (seems decent so far), but it seems to do a pretty awful job of importing the hitbox part of the CVH. It'll get the vertices right (I think), but other than that...

Custom-made CVHs are hit or miss for importing into milkshape... It works on some, not on others, and it really doesn't make any sense to me.

For the texture in milkshape, I've had to go into the material editor and re-choose the texture for almost every model I've imported, as it doesn't load it properly. The UV Map works fine, but it doesn't show the texture for most of it.