The primary 3D artist on Sins II’s development team, Paul Kiesling (Set), was kind enough to swing through this month to provide a “short” explanation on how we hardpoint assets to get them properly working in Sins
Let's say you have a finished good-looking ship model; how do you make it work in game? We must hardpoint the ship so that the game has the necessary location data of where to put turrets, fire torpedoes, or prop effects. Let's start with getting your ship centered in the scene before dropping any hardpoints onto the ship. You want to make sure the center of your ship is seated at X:0 Y:0 Z:0. This isn't a hard rule but a good rule of thumb when setting up a ship for use in game.
Lets get some nomenclature out of the way so we understand how hardpoint naming actually works.
Singular - This applies to center, above, aura, bomb. These are hardpoints that dont need numbering. Having more than one is unnessary.
Serialized - This applies to your weapon, or ability hardpoints. Ships may have multiple fixed weapons, and you will need a way to distinguish themselves.
Ex. weapon.0, weapon.1, weapon.2, ability.0, ability.1, ability.2
Bank - Lets say you want missiles to fire from multiple hardpoints, you can break them out into banks to better control their range of fire. In this instance on we used weapon.0 for all of the missiles hardpoints on the Eradica. We divided them into 6 banks
weapon.0_bottomleft
weapon.0_bottomright
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weapon.0_topleft
weapon.0_topright
Now you could label these weapon.0, weapon.1, weapon.2 etc etc, however for the sake of organization we want to denote that all of these hardpoints are firing the same weapon. So they are all labeled as weapon.0, following the underscore is the location of the bank. Now there is one more important note for these banks.
weapon.0_topleft-0
(weapon.0) This indicates the weapon being fired
(_topleft) Location of the bank in relation to ship
(-0) A way of using multiple hardpoints as one, everything following the - isn't exactly ignored by the game however allows the engine to use multiple hardpoints as one. In this bank we have points going from 0-14 that can serve as the firing order for these points if you define the weapon as firing sequentially.
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Turrets
Turrets are the most nuanced part of hardpointing in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, They come in two variants gimbal and bi-axial. (Thats what we refer to them internally) we will start with the most common type.
Bi-axial
Bi-axial turrets consist of two parts (mount and barrel). Mount controls yaw, Barrel controls pitch. With both having their own respective arcs that control the range of motion the turret is capable of having.
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Red is the mount
Blue is the barrel
When setting up turrets getting your pivot points right is a must for proper turret behavior. The mounts pivot point is where the mount connects to the hull of the ship.
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Before starting the process of placing locators (hardpoints) lets talk about orientation. There is an eternal argument over which axis is up, some will say Y is up, some will say Z is up, and heretics who only serve the will of the warp will say X is up. Now for Sins of a Solar Empire 2, Y is up. So you will have to take that into account before exporting because directionality matters when exporting from source to engine.
Blender - Y is up
3DS Max - Z is up
Maya - Y is up
Regardless of what application youre using just seat your ship in the scene as it should be and just make sure youre aware of what direction is forward and up. For Blender and Maya a straight export is compatible with Sins as is, With Max our exporter compensates for Z being up and exports the ship/structure as if were doing it from Maya or Blender.
We do our hardpointing internally on 3DS Max, so this walkthrough will continue with that. These methods are not exclusive to 3DS Max as locator data, orientation and export are all things that can be done in Blender/Maya as well.
Now lets assume you have the ship centered in your scene, whats the next step? Now we have to get the core three hardpoints set up.
- Center ( What will define the center of the ship)
- Above ( A locator located straight up from center above the highest part of the ship)
- Aura ( A locator located straight down from center that sits slightly lower than the lowest part of the ship)
Before doing any other hardpoints it is heavily recommended that you do these three prior to moving onto the weapons/engines/abilities.
In 3DS Max, you want to navigate to your right-hand side bar. Click helpers and use dummy. Drop a dummy into the scene and move it to the scene's origin. So, X:0 Y:0 Z:0, this will be your center point. Next what you want to do is orientate the dummies as you want the locator data to follow the same axis orientation as the game.
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