Track conversion newie: Learning pains

[Miguel Garcia]

Hello Everybody,

I just started with the track conversions, following Racehard's tutorial.  I got all the gmt extracter, the maxscripts, hardwareshaders, dds convertion tool, etc etc etc.  All that seem to have gone alright so far but I'm  having issues trying to bring the track in 3ds (2011 is the version I have available):

---->In the maxscript to import the gmt files, If I choose the .tga textures that I just extracted, then the textures don't come in and all I have is a black multi material, with nothing in it (all objects are in, but they have not textures...

----> If I choose the folder that contains the original .dds textues I extracted before converting them to .tga,  then the textures start to load but the program gives me an out of memory error at some point before the loading is finished....

At this point I have 3 different possible causes:

1. Data problem:  One texture or gmt file in the entire scene is bad, corrupted or causing problems...
2. Software configuration:  Problem with the version of 3ds (2011, instead of 2010), cache memory allocation, plugging installation, etc etc,
3. I'm making a mistake while extracting the gmt files from the mas files or while converting the textures from dds--->tga

To rule out #1, I can try giving the track to someone else with a known working configuration and see if they can bring it in their 3ds, that will imply that the data is not the problem
To rule out #2, I would need 3ds 2010 and repeat the whole thing again... I will hate to to this one, because they're not many places to get 3ds2010 anymore....Or, I can try to convert a track that someone else has already successfully converted and see if I can actually get it imported...
To rule out #3 After ruling out #1 and #2, Play around with the parameters, for the extractions, etc etc etc, and try to get it to work....

It is worth mentioning here that I have open communication with the author for the tracks and therefore I could get the 3ds version of the track that he used to create the .mas files as well...

What do you think?

[LauZzZn]

you need tga and dds in one folder, and you need to wait a loooooong time until its loaded it gives me that "problem",too that it doesnt answer but you just have to wait

[Miguel Garcia]

thanks Lauzzzn, but I'm actually having an "out of memmory" error,  3ds halts and then it shuts down!

[LauZzZn]

okay.. ehm i think i read 3ds 2011 but you need 2010

[Miguel Garcia]

That's what I'm thinking too... Don't know where to find it...

Would you please send me (or point me to) a track that you have successfully converted? If I can use the same track and import it in 3ds, then the version is not the problem.  Same way, would you please just try to import one of the tracks I'm trying to work on?  In that way, we can also rule out a bad track object or texture... let me know!   We can use dropbox. 

Once I get this to work and learn how to do this, I'm planning to convert at least 6 tracks! That will be very good for our community!

[Miguel Garcia]

Ok, last night I had some progress regarding the out of memory issue:

I started loading the objects one at the time and they are loading ok and without problems so I believe I will be running into an out of memory issue soon (if I saturate the memory) or if I actually attempt to load a bad object/texture!

will keep loading... If you think that loading the whole directory is kind of slow... try one object at the time 

[Aritz]

I have the conversion process forgotten... Lauzzzn instead is a very good converter, so follow his instructions.

[Miguel Garcia]

Thanks Aritz

Will do that... Lauzzzn indeed helped me a lot yesterday pointing out that the dds and tga file have to live in the same directory... We'll see if I can get the whole track in, one object at the time without running out of memory now