Can someone help me turn an FBX into a building for the game?

[Kyriakos]

I have the fbx ready, it is a model i made of an ancient greek house.

The model is far from perfect, i just made in a few min in 3dsmax. But it can serve as an example.

The file is at http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=15481&act=down

If someone can show me how to turn it into a civ5 building- or do it himself- it would be great

 

[lazor]

I would love to know that myself, I tried experimenting with fbx files exported from blender and the nexus tool. So far it seems importing the 3D geometry is working fine, but I could not get a texture to display on the model.

If you import the fbx a material editor will open, there you can select different shaders, one of them being a BuildingShader which seems to be the obvious choice for a building, and then you can select files for different types of textures (depending on the shader). Diffuse texture is probably the most important one, I assume sref is something like surface reflection, no idea about the others but I've seen models from the original resources that work fine with just these two textures (I used amer_palace to experiment a little bit).

Using a custom named model and texture would always produce errors when I pressed the Validate button in the Asset Viewer, because it could not find the files, even when I placed them in the the Resources/Common (and Resources/DX9 for the texture) directory. Don't know whats the problem there exactly.

It does however display the amer_palace just fine if I just rename everything and also adjust the .fsxml file. I can even just put another .dds there and it will displayed on the amer_palace model. So that seems to be working fine although the Validate Button produces errors.

Which leads me to believe that maybe exporting from Blender did not really work as it should, or I need to understand how exactly the Material Editor works to make an Material that will get displayed (seems likely).

PS: I tried with your model and it made nexus crash. Interestingly it is a Binary file, whereas the one I exported from Blender is a clear text file.

 

[Kyriakos]

Thank you for trying

So, should this be just a difficulty with the new tools? Since i do nto see 3dsmax exporting an FBX in any other way (?)

 

[lazor]

I think it should be possible to import your file, at least in theory. The Nexus tool seems to be quite buggy, all I can produce reliably at the moment are black cubes and crashes.

I did however find out that my geometry is exported and imported correctly, all UVs are there. But, the Material Editor does not set a texture, a material is created fine, but the texture is always missing. You can check out the .gr2 file contents with the Granny 3D Viewer for which I just posted a link in the Utility section.

Also, you might want to try the 3dsmax exporter for Granny3D files I found, which I linked in the utility section as well. With that it should be possible to circumvent the whole nexus importer thing and just produce a working .gr2 file.

 

[Wirapuru]

lazor, after all that did you get any new model to show ingame? Incomplete or not?

 

[lazor]

lazor, after all that did you get any new model to show ingame? Incomplete or not?

I have not tried yet. I will when I have some time to play around with nexus again.

 

[MerakSpielman]

This "texture not showing up" problem is tickling the back of my brain. Like I've run into it before making games with DarkGDK. Completely different development environment, but maybe the solution is similar.

I'll ponder it. Maybe I'll figure it out.

 

[allypower]

same problem here, all black.... no textures.

 

[MerakSpielman]

This "texture not showing up" problem is tickling the back of my brain. Like I've run into it before making games with DarkGDK. Completely different development environment, but maybe the solution is similar.

I'll ponder it. Maybe I'll figure it out.

lol I should have known better. I tried in Max and Maya, making a simple cube textured with a simple image file. Then I tried using the Nexus Asset Import feature. It said it successfully imported the asset and then opened up a new screen with 3d Preview, Material Editor, Animation Manager (grayed out), and Model Manager.

Then I tried the 3d preview button. I got a bright pink untextured cube on a black background. (This is when I exported the fbx from Max. My exported .fbx from Maya just crashed Nexus.)

So my cube was showing up, but not its texture. Which was odd because I made sure I embedded the textures when I exported the .fbx.

Then I noticed that when I imported the fbx in Nexus, it created a folder with the texture in it! It extracted the texture for me, automatically.

So I tried the Material Editor button.

And this is where I got stuck. No matter what I did, my "Material Preview" was always just a white circle (correction: sometimes it was a black circle). I Added Material, I selected one of the several Shaders which allowed a file name selection, and selected the texture file. But I could never get anything to successfully appear in the Preview.

I fiddled with some of the numbers, changing the AlphaMode or the shader options, but nothing worked.

 

[Galacticat42]

I've been messing with Nexus too, I made a building with Maya and noticed there were quite a few different FBX compression types (FBX_20100, FBX_20090, FBX_20080, etc) I selected the most current (FBX_20100 since I use Maya 2010) with embedded textures, etc. and exported. I imported into Nexus got the pink mesh in the previewer and no texture in the material editor after I tried BuildingShader and BuildingShader_Skinned to no avail.

@MerakSpielman
You can just skip the material editor since all that does is make a FXSXML file which can be easily made in a text editor. Open another building's FXSXML file and edit it for your files, your texture should be applied when filling in the lines.

 

[Kyriakos]

So i guess no one has managed to make a working building yet?

So much for the game being the most moddable in the series. :/

 

[Kyriakos]

Any news regarding the building creation front?

 

[JeBuS27]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9828082&postcount=11