And there it is, nice one man. Alright, so Ive gone ahead and named

Missiles:

P001-Weapon-1

P002-Weapon-1

P003-Weapon-1

P004-Weapon-1

P005-Weapon-1

P006-Weapon-1

Cannons:

P001-Weapon-0

P002-Weapon-0

Lasers:

P001-Weapon-3

P002-Weapon-3

Lookin good?

[edit]

Hey man, new problem. When rotating the hardpoint (dummy) in 3ds max, to the specified direction, it appears to stay the same. Example, I rotated the Exhaust dummy to point behind the ship, but when I unselect that dummy, and click it again, it still pointed in its origional direction.

This is concerning as when I placed all the dummys for the other hardpoints, they all appeared to be pointing forward, but if this isnt the case and max is just being strange..

Yeah most of the modders I know use XSI instead, but Im more comfterble with 3ds, and the process for adding textures and hardpoints seems much simpler in 3ds, no convoluted texture linking, and phong is simply created by selecting it from a dropdown. Tangent is still in question, the 3ds plugin converts to .mesh an this video tutorial didnt mention the tangent for the 3ds process so no worries I guse.

That aside my last real issue is knowing the true rotation of hardpoints in max as once rotated, no matter what direction, max always shows the arrows of hardpoints (dummys) in the same rotation when you click them again.

Heres an example, the hardpoint is clearly roated 45 degrees, yet the max arrows say otherwise.

This is especially annoying since I thought all the other hardpoints (above, center, aura, cannons..)were already facing forward, but it looks as though the true direction is not reflected by the xyz arrows in the view ports.

The max arrows should not change depending on your rotation AFAIK. You can rotate via pivot as Carbon states or rotate the entire object. But you'll want to be looking at the pivot to see their actual "direction".

The P001 is basically "padding" that will get eaten when it gets converted, it doesn't even need to be "named" in that manner, e.g. any combination of numbers or letters can take its place as long as it's that many characters and is unique. As such, they are not independent and are global for everything so every hardpoint must have a unique arrangement in front of it or the lard spills out of the bucket. Here's some shots of a ship ready for conversion, at least to XSI. I stopped using the max plugin when it was giving me 10 hour exports for very basic models. I only use XSI to point the tangent to the same UV's the base model is using. I find using the XSI interface to be nothing short of infuriating, so hardpointing and such in it just seems silly when you can do all of that in max no problem.

I don't have image editing software installed so here's a rundown of what you're looking at.

I have the Coordinate system set to View (sort of top center-ish), then I can use affect only pivot mode to see the individual hardpoints and what direction they face. You can physically turn them or turn their axis. The coordinate system changes how it views those axis so if it's set to something else it may make it seem as though you are rotating them but aren't or vis versa.

Note the naming scheme for the hardpoints keeps a unique hardpoint for the names but since there's so many hardpoints I end up exchanging p for other letters because I lose track of them, but need to make sure they are unique.

I don't know why it does that for me, it could be something related to my i7 and maxscript not playing nicely. The sc2 plugin also takes forever to export, with simple meshes taking up to 5-6 hours a piece.

Well, I had a pretty quick pipeline narrowed down for XSI. I could go through max -> XSI -> sins in about 2 minutes or less, just waiting for XSI to putter around in its slow manner. That and my project is finished. I appreciate the gesture, though.

Make mine--they'll still appreciate it