track-building and other

[Guest Uzzi]

I just finished converting one of my SCGT tracks to netKar. It was a little bit easier because I was working from my original max files that I used to build the track with. Heres a summery;

The main problem I had was dividing the track pieces into sectors; renaming everything was made easier by using the nKTrackUtilities Max script. once everything was divided the way I wanted, it could be renamed very quick with the tool.

The actual dividing of my pieces required attaching all of the track pieces togather, then detaching them up by material id, assigning the peices standard type materials, then detaching those peices into 100 meter sectors. The final step was easy for me because my track was already divided before-hand, so I just had to select the sections by element then detach.

Next I had to convert all of my textures to tga format, I used Paintshop Pro 7's batch converter to this task, Then I reasigned the tga's to my materials in max. all 90 of them, some I even had to assign twice because I had multiple subobject materials.

The other problem I ran into was that all of my materials were multi/sub object materials. I found out while working on the conversion that you can drag and drop the sub materials out of the material browser into the material editor and reassign them to the track pieces as standard materials.

[Guest outrunner]

Hi Uzzi...so...I'm realizing other tools to make the creation of tracks in nK a bit easy.

For the moment...try this one: it divide all objects by ID and assign a Sdt Material extracted by his MultiMaterial.

Istructions:

1) Do it before rotate/move/scale enything

2) Select you geometry ad press the "Explode selection" button

3) The script generate new objects with the original name plus the ID number (for example... objectname_ID_1, objectname_ID_2 etc)

4) At this point, reselect all and press the "Purge selection" button

5) This part of script clean your scene by all the "empty" objects (if the object hasn't geometry it will be erased)

...end...

Good work

ExplodeByIDv2.ms

[Guest Uzzi]

Cool tool! It should be great the next time I convert one of my tracks. btw, did you check out my track yet? Im planning on entering 2 versions of it. Just finished both. I had to do some tweaking of the cameras today, but thats better now.