ME Block Tools for Blender

The first layer contains the model of the fully-built block. You don’t need to restrict yourself to only one mesh-object on this layer. If it’s useful to split your block into several objects — probably to apply modifiers to some of them — by all means do so.

The second layer contains the simplified meshes that represent the block’s collision shape. If you don’t provide any collision meshes the resulting .mwm file will not contain collision data and ME will default to a simple collision box that encompasses the volume of the whole block.

Havok, the physics engine of ME, requires some settings to do its work. You provide those on Blender’s Physics tab by enabling Rigid Bodies for your collision meshes. Only the settings Shape, Mass, Friction and Bounciness (Restitution) are exported to Havok.

Of those settings Shape is the most important because it has a significant performance impact. Whenever possible try to only approximate the shape of your block. Use primitive shapes like Box or Cylinder. Use Convex Hull only if necessary. Avoid Mesh collisions.

The third layer defines the mount points of your block. The meshes on this layer are not directly exported but are used instead to calculate the mount point definitions .

This works by creating rectangular faces that use the material MountPoint and are aligned to one of six sides of the block. To quickly create the material and an object that has one mount point face for each of the six sides use the corresponding button on the Tools panel of the 3D view. Duplicate, resize and move those faces in edit mode to create more mount points for a side of the block. You can also split out faces to several objects if you want to apply modifiers like 'mirror' or 'array' to some of the mount point faces.

For mount point editing it is a good idea to switch to ortho-view (Numpad 5) and turn on 'snap to grid'. You can also tell the add-on to show the block’s bounding box by enabling the option on the scene tab . It’s dashed, orange lines represent the space your block occupies in-game. This should help you to position the mount points correctly.

If you don’t provide mount points none will be calculated. The game defaults to full mount points on all sides of the block in that case.

Layers 11-13 are used for the construction stages of the block. There is one layer for each stage of construction, from earliest to latest. If you change the number of construction layers you increase or decrease the number of construction stages. A block is allowed to have no construction stages at all.

By default the construction stages reuse the same collision shape your main block model uses. It’s possible to change that using different export settings. But keep in mind that can be dangerous to a ship or the player if a block changes its physical dimensions when it is welded to completion.

Layers 6-8 are used to model versions of your main model that have progressively less detail. The game can display those models when the block is too far away to see the small details of your main model. This way less triangles need to be rendered which is good for performance. The default distances at which the models are switched are 10, 30 and 50.

The ColorMetalTexture (_cm) and NormalGlossTexture (_ng) correspond with the common metal/roughness workflow where glossiness is just the inverse of roughness. Here the normal map uses the OpenGL convention, i.e. in comparison to the DirectX convention the green channel is inverted.

The AddMapsTexture (_add) combines additional greyscale maps in its four channels:

The AlphamaskTexture (_alphamask) is optionally used to make parts of a texture transparent. It has a single greyscale channel which really only differentiates between two states: fully transparent below a value of 128 or fully opaque at 128 or above. This is most useful for things like foliage and small details like facial hair. If you want to use this texture you need to also set the technique of the material that uses it to Alphamask.

Materials are what you use to tell ME which texture-files to use for the faces of your meshes (and you use UV-mapping to tell the game which part of a texture to use for a face).

In Blender there are several types of materials depending on the renderer selected. Blender Render is the default option, however for the node-based ME materials to work you much switch to the Cycles renderer.

This add-on needs you to use node-based materials because it sets up several nodes to preview the textures in Blender. To generate these nodes, after creating a new material you should click the button. You need to repeat this for each new material you define.

By doing that you get four texture-slots for the different kinds of textures ME expects. Point them each to the texture-file corresponding with its name.
You will also see two sets of sliders for Parallax and Wind. These are explained below.

Parallax mapping is a new feature to ME that creates an illusion of depth on a flat surface. To get parallax working you will need a greyscale heightmap in the blue channel of the AddMaps file. You will also need to set the Parallax Height value in blender. This value sets the scale of the parallax effect. The second slider, Offset, is used to offset the "back plane" of the parallax. It is best to play around with these values and see the effects in game to understand what they do.

ME has an option to apply a wind animation to your models. You can see this animation on the leaves of some plants and trees in game. To use the wind animation, simple set the wind Scale and Frequency for the mesh material you want animated.

Glass materials are handled specially by the game. They have some extra settings that are not contained in an .mwm file but are instead stored in a file called TransparentMaterials.sbc. It makes no sense for this add-on to support editing the content of this file because the settings cannot be viewed in Blender, anyway.

What you get if you change a material from Normal to Glass are the settings that are stored in the .mwm file on export. For the meaning of these settings please refer to Keen’s tutorial on transparent materials.

ME uses empties to represent predefined points of interest on a model like interaction areas and effect origins (smoke, fire, etc). The purpose of each empty is determined by its name — i.e. detector_inventory or detector_furnace for example.

This node uses a layer mask to filter out objects that are not on the marked layers.

This filter matches objects by their name. You can either choose an exact name or switch the node to use a regular expression. You can also invert the match so only objects get included that do not match the pattern.

This filter works just like an Object Name filter, only on the names of groups the object is in.

This node has two input sockets and selects between them depending on the currently exported block-size. This is useful if you have objects in your scene that should only be exported for one block-size but not for the other:

This node adds one output-socket for every layer you select. Each of those sockets only provides the objects from the corresponding layer. This is useful for sequential groups of meshes like construction stages. The node also implicitly numbers the output-sockets starting at 1. The number is available for text-substitution as parameter ${n}.