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sdfgeoff

Beta Tester

Registered: 2013-09-27

Posts: 103

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Converting Descent Levels

Here's the process I went through for porting Minerva to .dxf, in case anyone else wants to try using descent levels without completely remodeling them:

1) Open the level in lvlview, and export it as a .dxf
2) In blender, enable the dxf importer addon and the .map exporter addons (File -> User Preferences -> Addons search 'Quake' and search 'dxf'
3) Import the map (File -> Import -> DXF)

4) Now is the hard part.
.map requires geometry to be closed, convex surfaces. The blend exporter does this in one of two ways: if it is a cube or tringular extrusion, it exports it as is. If it is not, it breaks it into quads, extrudes them into cubes, and exports that.
The problem is that descent levels didn't require cubes faces to be planar, and so some cubes are distorted into triangles. This introduces some concave surfaces. But the exporter doesn't figure this out. So some manual tweaking is required. I find triangulating (select everything ctrl+t) and then splitting by angle is a good place to start (the edge split modifier on an angle of 0 degrees)

5) Now we can export it. (File -> Export -> .map)

Notes
* Lights do not export at all, so they have to be done in Torque Constructor.
* I have not tried materials at all yet, and don't have the faintest clue how to do them, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
* I ended up doing a lot of manual remodeling anyway, as a lot of the geometry fits quite neatly into cube-shaped blocks that just need connecting. The exporter originally wanted >600 brushes, but my tweaked version only has 229.

Troubleshooting:
If you have malformed brushes, you may need to check that the normals face outwards on existing cubes, or inwards on tunnels (ctrl+n for outwards, ctrl+shift+n for inwards). Or you may have some concavity. Try revisiting step 4.