Hi,
I'm still knockin' my head against the wall of formats conversion to jump from Q3 to UT maps but casually I've found this, maybe it could be useful for your UT mapping works.
I think you all know "Google SketchUp": it's a software by Google that you can use to create any 3D models, it is used also for modeling city buildings for Google Earth.
Ok, nice but nothing special for UT community...really ?
There is a plugin that you can use to export SketchUp 3D models into UT99 format (.t3d), yeah !
This plugin (compatible with SketchUp 6.x/7.x) allows you to export SketchUp 3D models to ASE/T3D/PSK formats for UT99/UT2K3/UT2K4/UT3 game engines. You can also import .t3d files into SketchUp to modify works previously built up with Unreal Editor in UT99.
Visit these pages, this project sounds very interesting:
link1: http://forums.epi...p?t=619593
link2: http://hardpcmtec...l/hskp2unr
Moreover, as you can see, if you want to create your own webpages where to publish your works in progress, you can insert your 3D models using a simple <IFRAME></IFRAME> HTML tag linked to a Google page. Nice !
Here another example: http://sketchup.g...5c7c7437a8
And here an example in which SketchUp was simply used for a concept design of a DM map.
YouTube Video
See the attachment (ZIP file): you simply have to copy the .rb file into the "Plugins" subfolder of your Google SketchUp install folder.
Hi,
I was able to take a deeper look at 3D format conversion. The plugin available for Google SketchUp is the only external tool I've seen till now that is able to generate a .T3D file compliant to standard UT .T3D format.
Visit this link: http://wiki.beyon...y:T3D_File
If you build a simple object with SketchUp, convert it to .T3D format and then open it with any text editor (also Notepad), you will see that the file format is exactly the same.
There are many software on the market that you can use to obtain .T3D files from different sources but the critical step seems to be always the parsing of the .T3D file: the final file format is never correct and in the best case, you can open it in UEd only by using "Brush > Import" command ("File > Import" command doesn't work at all !).
Talking about map conversion, maybe it's worth converting large maps available in other formats (for example, the .BSP format from Quake3Arena) by slicing the original map into smaller blocks.
Moreover, in UEd brushes can be imported also in .DXF and .ASC format, this could be an interesting alternative if your .T3D files don't work. Unfortunately, at the present time I can't say anything about it because I never tried this method.
I'll keep on studying this workflow and if I'll find something useful, I'll post some infos.
but casually I've found this, maybe it could be useful for your UT mapping works.
