Dave Townsend
Legend Entertainment Company
703-968-5067
Last Update: 25 May 2001 by Steve Tack
Models must be made up of a single 3D Studio object, which lives within the 256x256x256 coordinate space centered on the origin. (Setting the grid extents to –128..128 and turning on the grid is helpful here.) The model itself should be centered on the origin (0,0,0) because of how Unreal specifies the collision cylinders used to determine when objects are touching.
Object polygons shouldn’t intersect. The hardware supported by Unreal gets confused when polygons intersect, resulting in an unpleasant shimmering.
If your object is a character that will be carrying a weapon that will be separately modeled, place an extra polygon (the weapon triangle) in or on the part of the character where the weapon should be. This polygon will be invisible in the game; it’s just used to sync the weapon’s position with the character’s animation.
The conversion tool will only convert objects with sequence
numbers in their names (Obj01, Obj02, ...). The object
name itself is meaningless; it’s the sequence numbers that count. They must
begin at 01 (even if that’s the only frame!) and you can’t have any “holes”
in the sequence. (Under 3D Studio
4, it was easiest to use the “Snapshot” option; I’m not sure how 3DS MAX handles
this.)
Objects that won’t be animated (e.g. 3rd person weapon views) should be in their own .3DS file (e.g. save the angreal of healing as AngrealHeal.3DS).
Make sure that all animation frames stay entirely within the 256x256x256 coordinate space.
The Unreal animators are typically designing their animations for 30-35 fps playback. Then, to save memory, they shave the animations down to 15-17 fps and let Unreal do the tweening.
Objects that are animated should have a separate .3DS file for each animation sequence (Run.3DS, Walk.3DS, Shoot.3DS, etc.). You probably want a separate directory for each animating character, so that each can have it’s own Run.3DS sequence.
You still use 3D Studio to do your texture mapping. However, there are some (pretty heavy) restrictions on what will actually show up in Deus Ex.
The only type of texturing that has any effect is using actual texture maps – bump maps, opacity maps, specular maps, etc. are meaningless. Furthermore, the bitmaps that you use as textures should be 256x256 pixels in size, and you can’t have more than nine of them for any one model. To conserve memory, you should use as few texture maps as possible. 3DS Max V2 allows you to map part of a material to your geometry; using this feature lets you squeeze many smaller texture maps together into one big bitmap.
Under most circumstances, the material names that you use in 3D Studio don’t matter. However, there are several pre-defined material names that you can use to get special effects when the model is imported into Deus Ex. The special names are:
|
SKIN |
This texture will be assigned as the model’s Skin property in Deus Ex. |
|
TRANSLUCENT |
The polygons mapped with this texture will be marked as translucent, and can have their transparency set by the program. |
|
TWOSIDED |
The polygons mapped with this texture will be marked as two-sided, so the texture mapping will show up on both sides of the polygon. This works the same as 3ds2unr, which means the surface will also be set to "masked". |
|
WEAPON |
The polygon (there should be only one!) mapped with this texture will be marked as the weapon triangle. So it won’t be visible |
|
TWOSIDEDNORM |
This is the samed as TWOSIDED, except that the surface will be set to normal instead of masked. |
|
UNLIT |
The polygons mapped with this texture will be self-illuminating, meaning they will be brightly lit regardless of the light sources near it. An example is the part of the light switch in Deus Ex that is visible even in the dark. |
|
FLAT |
The polygons mapped with this texture will not be rendered with smoothing between polygons. That can be useful for certain types of surfaces. |
|
ENVMAPPED |
The polygons mapped with this texture will be rendered with the Unreal engine's simulated evironment mapped effect. An example is the windows on Jock's helicopter in Deus Ex. Be sure to use a texture with some detail and not a solid color, or the effect will not be visible. |
Note that this naming convention applies to the material name itself; the filename of whatever TGA file you use as the bitmap is irrelevant.
NOTE: Because current Unreal tools will not be compatible
with the Deus Ex formatted .3d files that this utility produces (such as UnrealFX),
there will be no way of setting the special polygons, other than what is listed
above. I may provide an enhancement in the future that will allow any valid
combination of special polygon settings.
You’ll need a copy of the 3ds2de.exe conversion program, plus some way (Photoshop, Debabylizer, etc.) of converting TGA files to PCX format. A text editor (Notepad will do in a pinch) is also handy.
The conversion program expects an Deus Ex-like directory structure to exist before it will run. Specifically, you need:
1. a main Deus Ex directory (mine is c:\DeusEx), below which is a
2. project-specific directory (for example, c:\DeusEx\MyPackage), below which are
3. two directories, Models and Classes (e.g. c:\DeusEx\MyPackage\Models and c:\DeusEx\MyPackage\Classes)
This directory tree is what Deus Ex itself expects, so it may already be set up. If it isn’t, you’ll have to make it yourself before doing any conversions.
The converter is a Windows console application, meaning it runs by typing rather than pointing and clicking. Make sure that the 3ds2de.exe program is somewhere in your DOS path before you begin.
Once you’re set up, using the converter is pretty simple. Just type 3ds2de, followed by an optional class name and one or more .3DS files, like so:
C:\>3ds2de Trolloc Walk.3ds Run.3ds Attack.3ds
The converter reads the given 3DS files, and produces a class file (Trolloc.uc) and model files (Trolloc_a.3d and Trolloc_d.3d) to be used by Deus Ex.
If this is the first time that you’ve run the converter, you’ll be prompted to select your project directory (i.e. the directory from item #2 in the preparation list (for me, c:\DeusEx\MyPackage). Once you’ve set this directory, you won’t need to set it again. If you do need to change it, because you’ve began a new project, just type
C:\>3ds2de –setproj
and you’ll be able to select another project directory.
When specifying 3DS files, you can use standard DOS wildcard characters (`?' and `*'). So, if all of those Trolloc animation sequences were the only 3DS files in the current directory, you could type:
C:\>3ds2de Trolloc *.3ds
The class name is just the name of the object that you’re converting (Trolloc, AngrealHealing, Myrddraal, etc.) and is used as the base filename for the converter’s output. If you’re converting an object with no animation, you can omit the class name, in which case the base name of the sole 3DS file is used as the class name. In other words, this:
C:\>3ds2de AngrealHeal.3ds
does what you probably want it to. However, if you try to convert more than one 3DS file at a time without supplying a class name, you'll be prompted to make sure that the class name inferred by the converter is correct. For example, omitting the "Trolloc" from the previous example is probably an error:
c:>3ds2de *.3ds
ClassName [Walk]?
You can just hit Enter to continue with that name, or type the correct name (Trolloc) first.
Be careful with your class names – the converter will happily overwrite existing files.
The converter will create three files:
1. ...\Models\ClassName_a.3d
2. ...\Models\ClassName_d.3d
3. ...\Classes\ClassName.uc
(where "..." is your project directory).
The .uc file will contain the appropriate UnrealScript commands to import your model, list its animation sequences, and set its textures.
Deus Ex needs all three files to use your model. The same three files are used by the Mesh Viewer (see below, and separate documentation) to view models.
NOTE: The scaling factor in the mesh import statements will default to 0.00390625 (1/256) in the generated .uc file. That is a Deus Ex specific change.
Since the converter doesn’t read 3DS materials files, and Deus Ex requires PCX rather than TGA-format input, you have to manually help out the converter.
First, you need 8-bit PCX versions of all of the textures that you used in the model – use Photoshop, etc.
You then need to examine the .uc file in a text editor that can handle straight ASCII text – Notepad is fine. Look for the lines that begin with #exec TEXTURE IMPORT and note that each such line ends with a material name after a pair of slashes:
#exec TEXTURE IMPORT NAME=JSpider1 FILE=MODELS\Spider1.PCX GROUP=Skins // SpiderSkin
(The above should be a single line, but can’t be shown here legibly that way.)
Notice the reference to a Spider1.PCX file. Both Deus Ex and MeshViewer will need this file to properly display your model. It corresponds to whatever TGA file you used in the given material, SpiderSkin. You need to have this file name match the name of the material’s 8-bit PCX file, which you can do by either editing the .uc file directly, or renaming your PCX file to correspond with the name in the .uc file.
Using the above example, say that the SpiderSkin material was made with a SpiderSkin.TGA texture map. You’d convert that TGA file to and 8-bit SpiderSkin.PCX file. You could then either rename that file to Spider1.PCX (because that’s what the script is expecting), or edit the script to look for SpiderSkin.PCX instead of Spider1.PCX.
You might encounter the following problems when converting:
can't find file
You referred to a file that
doesn’t exist. Make sure you’ve typed
the name and directory correctly.
No project directory found – exiting
The converter couldn’t establish
a project directory, either because you cancelled out or there’s a problem
in the system registry. Make sure
that your project directory structure is correct, then try rerunning the converter
with the
–setproj option before attempting conversion again. The converter cannot run without a project
directory.
read error [TAG]
The converter was expecting
data that wasn’t there. This probably
means the 3DS file is corrupted.
too many textures
Unreal has a limit of ten
materials that can be applied to an object, and the converter encountered
an eleventh material. For memory and
rendering performance reasons, you really should be using less than ten anyway.
Warning: out of sequence obj (Foo) skipped
The converter expects to
find sequentially numbered objects in file, and it found an object either
without a sequence number (e.g. Box instead of Box01)
or with an out-of-sequence number (e.g. Box01, Box02, Box04). This is probably something you want to fix,
although in some cases, like leaving a stray light source in the project,
it might be OK to ignore (providing that the correct object was converted).
Warning: Filename.3DS: Bad coordinate x.xxxxx, y.yyyyy, z.zzzzz
The converter found a coordinate
that was outside the allowable 256x256x256 coordinate space. Rescale your model or fix the animation sequence.
To minimize warning lines, only one bad coordinate is reported per
object in the file.
If you encounter errors other than those listed here, it probably indicates a converter bug.