Car Pack and Milkshape

#1 I've never worked with Brave Tree models, but I can suggest the following from my Milkshape experience. (make sure you save before trying anything ;)

The first thing you want to do is go into FILE--->PREF--->MISC and resize your joints to .25 or something. This will make the joints (represented as the blue circles) much smaller and the whole model should be easier to work with because you will be able to see it ;D Alternately, you could go to the joints tab and click the "joints visible" box off. That will make them invisible.

Before making changes, go into the groups tab and select each group one at a time, so that you can see what groups Bravetree has assigned to each material. Do the same with joints. That way, when you make a new mesh group, you can assign exactly the same joints and materials too it.

The strange characters in the material names are a result of an export from another 3d program.

In most cases, if you end a material name in a number, the exporter will assume its an LOD designation for that material.

name=start-end in the materials tab (exception to the above), is the syntax for a frame sequence, so altering these names could be altering animation sequences of some kind. Just guessing though. Since some of the names end in unusual characters, I can't be sure if they are true sequence frames or the result of an export from 3dmax or Maya.

The "opt scale" you can pretty much ignore for now. The exporter will put it back in anyways.

The fact that the model has joints to begin with indicates it may be animated.

If you replace the model with your own, and it is animated, you would have to re-rig it (assign vertices/groups to each joint). The wheels are a separate object in TGE if I remember correctly. So to get them to work properly, you would have to have the exact joint names. (this should correct the wheel jumbling).

I can't see the other tabs, so I'm going to guess that if you are getting a flat shaded prism, it's either a collision mesh that isn't transparent, or your skins/textures aren't properly assigned or in the proper place. All textures should be in the same TGE directory as the DTS/DSQ file. Check each group with the texture coordinate editor (CTRL+T) to make sure that they are properly assigned.

To make a collision mesh, name the group "collision [something]", and make a new material. (don't assign any texture file to this new material). In the Materials tab, set the emissive slider all the way down (left), this will make it invisible.

As a matter of good practice, select the collison mesh and hide it (under the EDIT tab), this will prevent you from accidentally modifying it while tweeking your main model.

Last, load the model into the TGE Show tool. If it looks ok there, then your problems may be script related and have nothing to do with Milkshape.

I know it's not a tutorial, but I hope it helps understand Milkshape a bit better so that you can do what you want ;]

Good luck!

#2 Just a little addition to the above:

Vehicles use joints to specify where wheel hubs, mount points, and the player's "eye" are. So, it is not necessarily animated, though I believe the BraveTree packs do include suspension animations so in this case David is likely correct.

Also, I've gotten those jumbled characters after my material names recently when trying to use the Torque DTS Plus exporter to add my material option tags (it use to work, but now it's just giving me exclamation points and weird characters). It could be that the ones you're getting are a result of the same sort of thing and that they should be tags such as "Illum," "add," "NoMip," or the like. Check the MilkShape TorqueDTSExporter documentation for more on those.

#3 Thanks a lot! I'll check it out.