I'm having very strange shading troubles. The only way to explain it is with a screenshot, so here are two of them. What can be done?http://www.bcenterprises.com/images/starship_sig.jpgYou can see it here on the engines and then on the pilot seats.

Although I'm not a Gmax user (tried, couldn't use that interface) my first thing to check would be check for dual faces (I've had it occur after a stack modifier collapse - I think) or if there are any twosided polys around (don't know how that stuff works). Also, try to do a dummy export after you have triangulated every face in the model - if that works better your model have nonplanar surfaces (can happen to anything except triangular surfaces), but I though makeMDL should alert on these.I'm not sure this is the problem, but if you don't fix it, you _could_ end up with the shading problems found on the default 747 rudder.Excellent work btw. Looking forward to fly her, if freeware ;)

Freeware all the way. And also (though not present in those screenshots), I think I've figured out that whole texturing thing, and it's looking pretty good. Almost done with base textures. I decided to remodel the VC, so that's looking better, too. Earlhttp://www.bcenterprises.com/images/starship_sig.jpg

Hi Earl,The dark shading on the cowls in the top pic is caused by a problem with your smoothing groups (BTW smoothing groups are different to the "meshsmooth" modifier and are found at the bottom of the "edit-mesh" rollout). Based on the pic I imagine that the whole cowl has been assigned to the same smoothing group. I would try putting the bit in front of the spinner, and the bottom of the cowl into different smoothing groups to the top and front of the cowl, or fiddle around with the "auto-smooth" function (less control but usually gives good results). Once mastered smoothing groups can be very powerful so it is worth playing around with this.I suspect the issues in the bottom pic are caused either by unwanted polygons that stretch between the front and the back of the seat, (in edit-mesh hit "view normals" and check to see if there are any normal lines pointing in wayward directions), double-sided polygons (as suggested above) or once again inappropriately assigned smoothing groups. If all else fails I'd scrap the seat backs and do them again! Might end up taking less time...All the best,Sean MoloneyRealAir Simulations,http://www.realairsimulations.com

Thank you. Just as a side note, the problem doesn't occur in Gmax-only flight sim. I will play some more with the smooth groups. Also, I had this same problem with the fuselage, but it corrected itself. I only with I remember what I did :) Earl(BTW, These are the second revision of the seats. The first ones had the same problem)http://www.bcenterprises.com/images/starship_sig.jpg

Hi Earl,If the problem doesn't happen in gmax then it might not be the smoothing groups :-(One possibility - try unchecking 'optimize' in makeMDL - might work?Sean MoloneyRealAir Simulations,http://www.realairsimulations.com

Thanks. Unchecking optimize worked great. It also fixed on of my animation problems, but I still have a few to work out. Earlhttp://www.bcenterprises.com/images/starship_sig.jpg