I've been going through the Unreal Ed 3 tutorials and the editor itself. It's mentally powerful and there are loads of features to play with. The tutorials give a good base but don't really talk about how to make a total conversion (which is what we are doing). The other biggish problem is that Lightwave won't export to the format we need. The format it requires is .ASE and that's not an option in LW. So, I'v downloaded the open source 3D package Blender, which being open source has a million different plugins, including an .ASE. It means learning yet another application but I think it might be worth moving away from LW. There's also a very comprehensive tutorial all over the web. I checked out Blender some time ago (Byrn suggested it, I think) and it was pretty rough, well it's come a long way. The other thing that's worth noting is that LW doesn't do 'Normal Maps' (think RGB high def bum maps) out of the box, which is a bit of a pain in the arse because detail become difficult to apply without it.
UED3 has a really powerful texture system - much better than LW. Some stuff will need to be created in Photoshop (or similar) but there is a lot to be added in the Unreal Ed, such as relfectivity, glow and all that stuff. I think a lot of the standard UT3 can be reused by us for things like cobbled roads etc.
So, that's what I've found out so far and will keep looking into it. The WMV video files look easily copy-able. If someone wants to come around to mine tomorrow (Sun), we can get the info moving about.
Blender is pretty powerful
Blender is pretty powerful once you get used to its way of doing things, much like any 3d program it has it's own little ways of doing stuff and they are different from anyone else's.
It's a good package though with all manner of fancy features most of which are not really applicable to unreal.
Still as modellers go it should do the job it has a fairly extensive system of modifiers to achieve various mesh tasks like subsurface mirroring and so forth. It also supports multi resolution meshes and has a fairly good sculpt mode (it's not z brush but then it is free). Its UV tools are widely regarded as the best available (at least that's what I've read I've used them they seem about as good as any other UV tools I've seen).
The second open source movie is currently in the works using blender (Called project peach) and the previous movie (elephants dream/project orange) brought some fairly significant advances in the capabilities of blender as a result so there should be some good tools coming along. At the moment a lot are animation rendering based which for the unreal mod we don't care about, but there are a few improvements to the modelling system in the pipe too.
Glad you've got some good
Glad you've got some good things to say about Blender. I had a play yesterday but real life things got in the way. I think the first thing I'm going to try is getting a rowboat into UT3 and floating on water.
I have no idea how to add a vehicle to system. It's probably a case of a series of static meshs which have some script attached to them. I've been through most of the videos now (except particle and the advanced level design, which reiterated earlier vids). I'll pass on the DVD to Byrn tomorrow. The WMV files can be easily found and copied off the DVD.
From the pervious version
From the pervious version the easiest way to make a vehicle was to make a specialisation of an existing one.
What I did for the boat thing (though I never got as far as making a custom mesh for it) was to take the hover class (the manta is a variant of this) and give it buoyancy so it would float in water.
Most of the stuff in air buccaneers were a base class customised from an existing type with some radical reworking to the structure then inherited smaller and larger versions from there.
I would guess we will define a boat class and then build the various ships from that.
One of the earliest vehicle tuts for ut2k4 is take a manta and specialise it so it has a different turret, I would imagine we can do something similar with ships, define a series of hard points for weapons then a set of turret types then just load out the boat as we see fit.
The scripting is OO so it's fairly easy to build up functionality at a series of levels with it, ie get a boat working, then make a larger version with a different mesh and slightly tweeked parameters, then a bigger version of that with a variety of turrets. The inheritance takes care of a lot of the functionality.