[EM] Creating ship mods in Evochron Mercenary

[Aikiro42]

Hi everyone!

I'm a first time user here, and I've really gotten into playing Evochron Mercenary. It was fun at first, a few mods here and there, but soon I began to think that the civilian and military ship models already look so bland.

I then started looking around the internet for ship mods. Textures, new models, everything. But all that turned out were the ship models from mass effect (?), and the new civilian ship textures.

Since I couldn't find any mod that suits my tastes, i decided to create my own ship models.

I have experience with Sketchup, so i started with that as my first tool - and after experimenting around a bit, I was able to find out that it can export .3ds and .obj files, which could be imported by many CAD software. After gathering a few 3D modelling software (Blender, Wings3D, and LithUnwrap), i was able to create my first military ship model... somehow.

TL;DR - the normals for my ship model seem to be reversed - when it faces a star, the rear lights up, as if it's facing the star. When I recalculated the normals in Blender, it ended up making the surface of the ship transparent and its insides opaque. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

P.S. I could only use Sketchup since it's easy to use and I don't have enough time to get used to 3D shaping with other modelling software - I only use the other software for model translation, scaling and conversion between different file types.

[Vice]

I'm not familiar with Sketchup, but it sounds like the normals would simply need to be reversed if they reflect backwards. You can do that in a modelling program that supports handling normals. I did put together a program myself a while ago that would flip normals on a DirectX plain text ASCII format model, which I could probably dig out and send to you. If you'd like to try that, simply contact me via e-mail (starwraith.com > contact) and I can try to hunt it down.

[Aikiro42]

Thanks! I'll contact you for the program. In the meantime, i'll look into reversing the normals via Blender or something.