Anim8or Community

Close inspection of the original 3ds that you provided (containing three copies of the Viper model) revealed that the Viper's model was damaged. Materials were missing, for example, the model was slightly out-of-kilter, and somehow the glass panes of the canopy had gotten out of registration with one another even though they're a single object.

I fixed a very few of the problems so the model superficially looks OK, but I didn't fix the more difficult ones. EG I didn't fix the canopy's glass, although I did make it transparent again.

Below is the 7zipped .an8 model of a single Viper, aligned with Anim8or's axes. and with its stripes restored. I've included the textures that it needs, the ones that I added back into it, which are only a few of the textures that it presumably started with. Below that are screengrabs showing how it looks in Anim8or and Celestia.

p.s. Applying the textures to provide the stripes actually was relatively straight forward.

Part of the damage to the model was the way the textures were mapped onto the right-side engine, the right-side upper and lower wing parts and the right side of the vertical fin. I deleted the damaged objects, selected their left-side counterparts (one at a time), and did a "build -> mirror image... x" to create their replacements.

I created materials names "engine_striped" and "fin" and selected the appropriate texture images in their material definitions. I was pleasantly surprised that simply selecting the appropriate parts of the model and "Apply" drew the images on the parts correctly. Apparently the texture mappings had been preserved on those parts even though the associated materials had been un-defined.

Steve,

Thanks, a lot! That did exactly what I wanted. I was able implement "decal" and "darken". Unfortunately, Celestia does not provide a way to add colors, only multiply, so I was unable to implement "lighten".

The revised CMOD exporter is now available at http://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/modelling.html#4.1

Here's a very simple example.

I created a directory within Celestia's extras directory named "example" containing subdirectories
an8
models
textures\medres

I created an empty file in an8 named example.an8
then opened it in anim8or and created a cube
I then created a jpg surface texture image in that same directory named "surface_512.jpg" (and copied it to textures\medres)
loaded the copy of "surface_512.jpg" that's in the same directory with the .an8 model into a material and applied it to the cube.
(See the upper left Anim8or window in the screengrab below)

I did a "save" in Anim8or, then exported the cube as "example.3ds" and moved that file into the "models" subdirectory.

I created a simple example.ssc which orbits the example cube around the Sun. See the editor window at the upper right of the screengrab.

I then ran Celestia and did a "goto example" See the Celestia window at the lower left. It's using the "surface_512.jpg"  that's in the medres directory.

I've appended a zip containing the resulting directory structure, an8 and 3ds models, and their textures. You can extract that Zip into your Celestia extras directory and should get the same results that I got.

It works best for me to have two copies of the textures: one in the directory where I work on the Anim8or model, the other in Celestia's directory textures\medres for when I want to display the model in Celestia. I often do the model work in a completely separate directory tree, not in Celestia's. It's a little awkward, but produces the necessary results.

I suspect the model and its textures weren't imported into Anim8or correctly. Make sure you have all of the texture images in the same directory with the model when you first load it into Anim8or. That way Anim8or is guaranteed to find all of the necessary texture images.

When I loaded your model into Anim8or with no texture images available, it complained about only one texture image.  In other words, Anim8or is only looking for the one texture image, so that's the only texture that Celestia will try to load, too.

I made a  white jpg with arrows to show the texture image's orientation, and they point in the same directions on both the Anim8or model and the 3DS model exported from it as seen in Celestia. See below.

Yup. That's why doing backups frequently is essential, especially when you're working on an important project.

FWIW, Western Digital disks currently come with access to a limited-function version of Acronis. It takes about half an hour to backup 150 GB on my Windows computer, going from an internal SSD to an external 3TB disk.

None of them have any surface textures associated with them. Is that the way you want them to be?