Ok, sorry, maybe i should stop expecting people to know stuff i know, just because i learned it one day. :/ So about the materials, the only reason you apply a texture inside sketchup or blender is to create a material tag (thats how it is called in other programs than sketchup mostly). This material tag is not more than a reference saved within the .dae file, the only use or information this reference has, is which face/polygon has to display which material. It is important here to understand the difference between material and texture, the texture is the image you apply to a material. The material is in first just a feature of the program you use, like a channel or layer, it does not have texture with it on default, but in most cases will have a default collour. This material/collour nearly always is a shader, but T3D doesnt work with shaders as 3d programs would. Now, if you apply a texture image to this material, it wont use the shader method anymore but the texture image you assigned, the only use of the material then left in place is the reference for the desired location of the texture image and the mapping method aka how the location is defined. T3D later can save even a reference for which texture image is used within the .dae but that is not important now. To summarize, you have to have a material assigned within sketchup/blender, but no texture image realy afaik, to make the .dae have a reference related to which faces have to display which texture images. Otherwise you have nothing to chose in the material editor, as you found out yourself. You dont have to apply all 4 texture maps within blender or sketchup, as those settings wont get saved within the .dae files and so not transfered to T3D anyway. Still it is most easy to apply the texture image already once inside sketchup/blender just to see if it will fit. I would highly suggest to use the uv-mapping technique, as it offers the most control and i saw sketchup is capable of using it. The textures i gave you just come into play at the very end, once you have imported your .dae to the game. The flickering of the preview cube within T3D shape editor is not allways caused by a failure of your settings but can also appear without relation to your work as i found until now. Even when it flickers you very well may have a perfect textured object later in the game and outside of this little preview window, assuming we can solve the rest of your problems. I guess i will download sketchup and have a look myself once again now to get an idea about texturing and mapping inside it. Edit: Anything of what i explained above is based on the limited knowledge i call my own, there might be failures, missunderstandings or missing details that im not aware of, but i would love to hear about. So if anyone has better knowledge please correct me! I would realy appreciate it as always when i can learn something new. Names are important and putting "colmesh-1" at the end of other signs within the name negates the reference character of the name.^^ It is important that you only have it called Colmesh-1 within the .dae, so the mesh itself, as the game engine will search for "colmesh-1" not "tree_colmesh-1" for example. The fact that you can edit the names in the shape editor does not make them less important, but more easy to edit in case you want to adjust values of LOD meshes for example, then you can just edit the number on the very end of the lod mesh name, instead of having to export it again from your 3D software after changing the name there.
You don't have to download sketchup to try to explain it for me, i am going to convert to blender as soon as i figure out the basics. i already know a handful of shortcuts for the program, all i need now (hopefully) is some more knowledge to where i lay the different images in the shape editor in t3d and i think i'm going to be able to use blender.
I really cant help much with Blender, I have no luck at all when using it. All I do is spend time making the model look how I want in sketchup. Then once its in game I use the material editor to enable anisotropic filtering. Some textures have a really grainy look and some don't. I just try and find an alternative texture if it looks too grainy. I am in the process of making a video tutorial that adds onto the info that Drowsysam's sketchup tutorial provides. I just need to reduce its length so youtube will let me publish it. Hopefully It will help build on what sam's tutorial leaves out. so stay tuned and hopefully a bit later today it will be uploaded.
You had them in the right places already in your last screenshot, within the basic texture maps tab and then like the names say, im pretty sure your problem lais in the material tag/reference being missing. I never had nor saw anyone having problems assigning the textures once the dae has a working material tag/reference for the textures position. So dont be too worried over that yet, first the reference has to work. Edit: Also i dont only download sketchup to help only you, no worries , but also to learn in general and maybe be able to help more people with the same problem in a faster manner in future.
this is getting annoying rely fast now, none of my textures work except the ones i apply in blender/sketchup. I might have overlooked something you guys have said to me, but that is most likely because i still do not know all the terms and sayings when it comes to texturing. Uv mapping and normal mapping is something i have never bothered trying to learn until now because i knew it was going to be a struggle. I appreciate that you guys are trying to help me out and i have gotten a bit closer since the last two days, but i still can't get this bloody mess working and i understand if you want to bail out if this.
It may indeed become strange slowly but bailing out was never a productive option. XD Please feel free to ask about any term related to texturing or normal maps that might have been used here or in the programs that you dont know or maybe feel like not understanding completely, so we know and can become more precise. Either you have to wait for the sketchup tutorial by jammin, search and practise some more blender texturing tutorials or you can upload the shown cube called test2.dae of your last screenshot, to let us have a look on it ourselfs. No idea if last option will help but it is allways worth a try.
Here you go: http://speedy.sh/N5bhr/test2.blend I am just about completely stuck now and don't know what might cause this.
Yes, comes in handy, but i mean the .dae file.^^ I see no real file structure within this blend file so that might be part of the problem. Do you set up the needed structure of Null objects and mesh names before exporting to dae and just gave me a blend file that is at an earlyer stage of work or did you export the cube from the scene as i see it? Not sure tho as i never exported anything without using the suggested inner file structure as seen on the wiki. Here is the complete article Exporting_static_objects The engine knows and searches for the names you see on all of those objects, only the LOD meshes should have custom names but end with the same structure of "_aXXX" (X being numbers for the display size of the lod mesh in pixels). But Lod meshes are a topic on their own again, feel free to ask about them too of course. I imported a .dae model of myself, i created it neither in blender nor sketchup but it follows the rules of exporting and so on. Note that i left out every Null object (used to group stuff) that i saw would not be needed to make the .dae file work. Such as "collision-1", "detailXXX", "bb_autobillboard25". ("collision-1" null object is not equal to a "colmesh-1" called mesh!) (hit the "1:1" button within the picture viewer if it is too small) Picture 1 shows the complete content of the scene, including materials and textures. I dont know if you have to deleete the camera and lights in front of exporting if you work with blender, would not harm to do so for sure but just ignore them for now. Picture 2 just shows the same without having the mesh bodys unfold their material/texture detail. Nr. 3 shows the material settings and Nr. 4 the texture settings. I dont realy know if that helps you, but that is how a working .dae file looks after getting imported to blender. Additional things to obey: I dont use correct LOD mesh settings in this one (no "_aXXX" number on the end of "CO90"), as i only have one single LOD mesh and so the game wont switch between multiple ones anyway, because of that the lack of a distance setting is not effecting it. You can ignore that for now! Furthermore, the material you see on the Colmesh-1 is not needed to be set up manualy before exporting, this material will be generated automaticly by blender upon exporting. At least if it works like my progam. :/ So just spend attention to the structure of the hierarchy and materials/textures on "co90". "start01" and "base" are obligatory null objects supposed to group the rest, you have to have them afaik. Also you have to consider that i created this .dae in another program and so some things might be different than when you work with blender alone, to check that back i would suggest blender tutorials about assigning materials and textures. If you work just with blender now, it might be enough to just assign a material to be able to assign the texture image to it later in T3D, but that is experimental and so maybe try that later. I hope this post isnt too confuse. :/
damn, i forgot there was a tut in the wiki for blender export btw, LOD stand for Level Of Detail right?
Yes correct, if you use two LOD meshes for example you can set one to 400 and one to 50. The 400 one will then be used for rendering as long the mesh takes 50 pixels or more of the screen size of the game, so 50+ of 1680 or1050 if we take that resolution as example. I think the bigger dimension is taken as reference, meaning if it is just 30 pixels tall but still 51 pixel wide it will use the 400 one. Once the mesh becomes smaller than 50 pixels the game will switch to the second LOD mesh and render that one instead. This makes you able to use additional versions of your model which have less detail, or at the end are just made of 2d planes, to save on performance. You can see examples of this on nearly every .dae model you got with the game, such as houses or the billboards on gridmap. You can test the effects of your LOD distance/size settings within the shape editor, by zooming in and out or activating the "levels" options and pull the slidelever around to switch between levels.
As i understood, it will only add billboards beside the model for you. Billboards displaying BeamNG.drive stuff, such as the ones you can find on the gridmap near the 3 ramps in front and on the right of your default car spawn, towards the huge pipes in which you can drive, beside the glass plane that you can use to see your car better while driving into it.^^
Ok, well here is my attempt at a video tutorial. In it I try to explain how to make different LOD's for your sketchup models. I also mention where and at what point of import you would apply normal maps. I have left out a lot of detail on the collision side of things for now and I will try and make a tutorial on that soon. Hope this helps Edit: Remade the video tutorial and added info on adding collision meshes too.
