Prefabs

RockyMarc

<div class="IPBDescription">import / export</div>G'day,

I think I asked this question many moons ago with no luck, now a lot has changed with the editor and I can make my U-Beams and PFChannels to anatomically correct sizes, I would love to be able to get a bunch of them together and make them into prefabs or blocks for everyone to use, just wondering if it's possible?
I had a look around in the editor, but it doesn't seem so? Unless there is a third party tool or what not? Or just save each one as a level?
Cheers.

example -
<img src="http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~rathbone3/SparkPFC.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />

fmpone

You can copy and paste bits of geometry or models from map file to file. Select whatever you want to move, copy it, and then save that map file and open a new one. You can now paste in that geometry/model/lights you selected previously.

RockyMarc

Ahh okay I thought so, are there any plans to make the editor to export / import prefab types?
and Would people be interested in these type of blocks?

Twiggeh

Imho i think they would look alot better as models than actual geometry.

soshy

thank you for good post!))

RockyMarc

Ah okay so as in models you mean like .obj ? (3ds max, etc)
Wouldn't that be limited in the editor as in extruding it to the sizes the user wants ?
Sorry quiet new to this editor, not sure if you can stretch or edit models in spark ?

Hello Soshy.

Remedy

Rocky in the editor you can go to the window tab and selected 'groups' this will open a new column in the editor.
With this you can click the 'add group' button and then it will allow your choose a name lets say "U-beam" and colour for this group.
After doing this use the select tool and select the U-beam you have made (hold control to select more than one item) and then click the U-beam group
in groups column and then click the large plus button to add the selected items to that group.

Now you have your first grouping, the good thing with grouping is that you can make a prefab section of a wall or detail and save them into a group
and then whenever you need that section you can simply click on the 'U-beam' in the groups column and it will select the whole U-beam
you saved to the group. Now you can edit that selection maybe scale it larger or copy and paste another U-beam to place another further down a wall
this is excellent for making rooms or map even have a consistent feel and look to it.

But no there is no community pool of saves like in Google sketch for instance.

Also you can pretty much scale anything in the editor just use the select tool (spacebar) and select what you want to scale
then click on the scale tool or press 's' for the hotkey and you can scale that selection any amount on the XYZ axis's.

Hope this helps and good luck!

RockyMarc

Yes thank you, I was having a play around with the groups and they are great.
So I guess I'm back to the other question, would it be best to just do this and save them as geometry or convert them into models? Can models be grouped and scaled?

Remedy

Well depending on whether you have the software and experience to make your own custom models then it is entirely up to you. There are pro's and con's to both props(models) and brush face geometry though.

Brush geometry after a while you can tend to have little 'cracks' in them where you join up two or more brush faces, this is because the vertices (little squares on corners) aren't actually snapped on the same location even though they appear to be. Copy and paste contributes to these cracks and if you build geometry not on the X,Y,Z axis's or scale them off these axis then copy and paste more than this only becomes more worse.

There is a way to fix this though I haven't had the time to do a tutorial on working with brush faces yet.

Though models on the other hand are great if you have the extra time to make them, though models require more effort if made correctly they will work great in your map. The only thing bad with props is that they use up more rendering from the engine. Also with Occlusion Culling for example lets say you want a big circular column in your map. If you make a big a circular model yourself or just scale a pipe model from the editor up very large, in the actual game if you are on one side of the column (even though you can't see the other side of column) the engine will still be rendering the side you can't see. Though if you use brush faces and say extrude a circle with 16 faces you made into a tall column the game will only render what faces it can see, because although they make up one large column they are still individual faces that can be separately rendered or not.

And with scaling yes you can scale models anything you can select can be scaled except entities (lights, tech points, power nodes).

RockyMarc

Ahh brilliant thank you very much for the help.
I use Revit & Autocad at work for structural designing, I know there is a way some how to convert Revit 3d models into .OBJ's I will have to look into it.
Cheers for the help.

Remedy

<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/wiki/index.php/Builder" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/wiki/index.php/Builder</a>

There is a link for the Spark Builder which covers from converting everything from models to sounds and lua code.

This should put you in the right direction.