There Tools

Measurement Guide by Celtic This guide shows the correlation between generic units-and feet, yards and inches. Useful when using gmax for the There developer program. The GMAX Guide by Carcus This really easy to follow guide will introduce you to the world of 3D development in There. In just a few pages it will walk you through the entire process from creation-to project submission!

General Developer Notes:

Shading

 

Actually what I do is set the normals to 1 so it will be affected by the games natural light which give it a slight automatic shading if dropped in different areas or direction. I know this may not make sense but here is how you do it easily;

After your totally done with your LOD0, go in to Editable Mesh and select all the polygons in the model. Then scroll down your right hand tool bar and go to the Smoothing Group section. Press Clear All, and then press Automatic. Then after you convert this LOD down to your other LOD's and bring in the root node etc. Open the properties on the root node (dummy node) and under the User Defined tab put in this line after the LOD distances;   Normals=1     and your done. What this does is give normal ambient lighting to your model using smoothing groups. When there is a abrupt edge (lets say 90 degrees) between two faces it will automatically shade one or the other slightly to give that edge definition. (oh dont forget to make sure the model is set to "NOT GLOW" for this to work)

You can test this by making a simple box and not doing this and see what the previewer shows you under different lighting. Then do what I said above and then export it and you will see that the edges are defined more since it automatically shades each side a tad different. This can be seen when after you set it to automatic, just select one face and see what smoothing group button is pushed in (should be like 1 or 2 etc) then on the next face 90 degrees to it, the smoothing group number will be different. By doing this it is like having a actual sun in the game so depending on how it is dropped, the light will affect each side differently.

Hope that wasnt too confusing. I think I am about the only person who uses this method and I havent really been using it too long. Took me a long time to figure that out. It is a great thing to use if your using light light colored textures. If you want to see it on something Ive done, do a try it on my Contemporary House and drop it in different directions in a paz and you should see that depending on how it is dropped the outer walls are a different shade on the 90 degree angles. Take note that I did no vertex shading on the outer walls except under the eve over the door. Most of these things like this most people never notice, but they notice it if it isnt there.

 

Most have adopted the There specs for the doors at 2m wide by 3.5m tall but I have been toying with it a bit and have gone down to 1.5m wide by 2.75m to 3m tall in some cases. There specs for ceiling height has been 5m and I have used it mainly for houses since it give a better aspect if your using the 2m X 3.5m door size, but if I want to give it a tight feel, I usually go 4m on the ceiling height. you can see that height on the Medieval House and on the Victorian Mansion. I would have to say the absolute minimum would be 3.5m but for some users it may be a bit too tight. On the Pirate Ship in the rooms and below deck area, I used 3.75m and it worked very nicely without pushing the limit of being too tight.