Doom3world

I'm fairly new to using maya.
I followed the instructions for rendering a bumpmap with a maya model at iddevnet. (I'm using quake 4) I triangulated all the geometry, (I'm assuming thats what they mean when they say "tripple" the model). I ran the cleanup and the geometry is manifold. When I try to render using the "renderbumpflat" command, It gives me this error:
Maya Loader F:\....texmdl.ma: Face is not a triangle
Its frustrating because as far as I can see, all the polys are triangles. I tried deleting the Image plain thinking that that might be the problem, but it still didn't work.
Anybody have any suggestions, or ways to dial in on the offending face (if any)? I'm thinking it's probably something simple that I missed.

Another quick question: as far as I can tell the Doom3 engine is a z-up
world. Maya is a y-up world. Does the engine translate which way is up?

Hmmm. Cleanup doesnt always do much of anything. Did you at anytime merge vertices? if you put some verticies together but forgot to merge them the program sometimes still considers them 4 or more vertice faces because the verticies are touching each others faces.

I would suggest selecting all of the verticies, go into the merge verticies options and set the distance to a very small distance and see if that does anything. Also, could you post either a pic or a dl of the model? its sometimes hard to determine a problem with guessing games.

OK, it's been a really long time, been busy with school and whatnot, but i'm back at the mapping thing trying to import my custom models into D3.

I never figured out the "face not a triangle" problem. My best guess is that there's some invisible node somewhere that D3 thinks has a face, but I don't know. For a while I had been using the Actor X plugin to export my .ase's, but when I started making the materials for the models I noticed the models were lighting completely wrong.

The first thing I checked was their normal maps, but that wasn't the issue. The normal maps lit correctly when set up as a regular texture. The normals on the models themselvs are messed up, on flat faces weird shadows come up following the egdes of the inner triangles, instead of lighting as a single flat face. (yes, I checked the model to make sure the faces were planer). It also screws up the way the specular map lights, I get really intense hotspots, iregardless of the spec map or viewing angle. I think I've tried just about every option combination the plugin gives me

I read somewhere that models in D3 use smoothgroups, and that having no smooth groups (or maybe just 1 for the whole model, I don't totaly understand it) could cause this messed up lighting. As far as I can tell maya doesn't use smooth groups, but I read the workaround is to split the single mesh into separate shells(but still the same mesh). So I gave that a try, and no effect.

So here I am again, stuck with two model formats. One format D3 will alow me to import (.ase) but for the most part looks like some kind of blackhole aluminum foil, the other wont imort at all. Actor X is the only .ase exporter I could find that works for maya 2008. The .ase export plugin I found (referenced in one of the threads) can only be found for Maya 8.0 or lower. I tried it anyway and all it does is give me "error:" in the console.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong or not doing something right when I build my models. It's all quad based geometry thats been triangulated. The same model that successfully imports with actorX gives me the "face not a triangle" error when imported as an .ma.

I've suddenly realized that I've switched back to D3 from Q4 since the last 3 years ago when I first posted this, and that this a Q4 thread.(Sorry) I get the same error in both games and it's the same engine so I don't think it makes much difference.
This is a frustrating problem. Any suggestions at all about any of this would be a godsend.

Screw .ma files... save your model as Obj, and you are good to go.