Adventures across the 3rd dimension

Well, I had to prioritize and didn't finish my "Halloween Bundle" for Founder's Fortune, so now I'm thinking I should make it a "Festive Bundle" instead and add some other celebratory type stuff. Not sure what, though. I mean, probably a Christmas Tree, maybe a Midsummer Pole and/or May Pole. But, I did a lot of harvest/pumpkin related stuff. Not sure there's an equivalent to that during other holidays (except maybe eggs for easter, but they don't have any chicken! Or birds whatsoever...) and I also did some gothic style furniture, and there's not really a christmas style or Easter style for furniture, so...

Well, I don't want to have to add 30 items more per holiday either, so I guess it's OK if there's mostly halloween stuff. But, if you have any ideas for what might make good ("medieval to renaissance age") decorations or such, feel free to let me know.

Last night I tried to make a base mesh with some nice topology instead of those messy, lumpy, high-poly voxel meshes that I normally end up with. I attempted to follow the first few minutes of this video...



...but of course mine didn't end up looking anything like that.
It just never stopped looking like a load of cubes.
Oh, well. Back to messy, lumpy sculpting.

At least I didn't get any Windows error messages this time. Not that I've done anything to fix that yet.

Remember those sunflowers I did like back in.... June, July?
Well, I'm having the same tedious issue again. And since I never resolved it with the flowers, I still don't know what to do about it.
I made a bed for the little founder's fortune fellows. The in game bed are greyed out (well, just the blanket really) when nobody owns them. Then they get a blue blanket once claimed. Well, my bed doesn't want a blue blanket. In my first try, they also ended up sleeping "in" the bed, as in, their nose would peek out of the pillow... While trying to get a changing material for the bedding, I renamed the cover and pillow (one mesh) "bed" and since then they sleep on top of the bed like they should. Which I don't understand because the positionControl bit of the json code doesn't actually connect it to any item/mesh names of any kind.

So one thing fixed, another still a problem. I can get the bed to use the vanilla game textures (though that means the UV texturemap is all wrong, so it doesn't look like it should anyway), or I can get bright pink (meaning the game doesn't know what materials to load, same as with the sunflowers), or I can get the texture I want, all the time. But I can't get the texture I want only when the bed is owned.

I looked into the example files. There's a folder with "old graphics" which contains one of the vanilla beds. And there's a furniture.json that I copy/paste from to my own furniture.json file. So that's where it says the material that should change, or rather the mesh with the material, is called bed. But in the old bed blend file, it's called "blanket". So obviously they've made changes which means it's hard for me to look at the stuff and figure out what to do.

Sorry this is all just a long rant. I suspect the game just won't recognise any new materials when it comes to changing them during game play. But it bugs me. And there's no point asking in the FF forum, because they just released their newest game in early access and bug reports as well as opinions on what they should add or change in that game are flooding in... so the only guy who ever has time to reply, really doesn't have the time, just now.

I feel all tired and bored and weepy and bored and annoyed and did I mention bored and it's probably not the best time to post anything. Or to try to solve problems. *sigh*

 I am examining the json sample file for furniture right now (assuming I downloaded the correct thing: ffmodkit), and checking out beds.

Thank you. Though I'm not sure there's much in it that can help It's not that much code, really, and most of it has nothing to do with the materials. It's just the "modules" bit, really.

The first part seems to be setting up the materials (as in resources) required, the quantities, and the necessary crafting requirement (I presume some kind of workbench or skill requirement to be able to craft it). The onlInRoom boolean, I am guessing, is telling it whether it can be placed outside or not. Then it defines the collision boxes and the size etc. of the object with whacky ZXY measurements instead of XYZ ( Blender!!!). Then the modules stuff is presumably different states of the object like whether it can be broken, and how much health, if you can own it, sleep in it etc.

I wonder if the isBed boolean under sleep is related to your problem with where the character is in relation to the bed as sleepingbags have false and ar on the ground, even though it is still under the bed category  (I have no idea how beds work... in game. Yeah... in game  ). And from what I can gather reading this, once owned it just swaps out the material to whatever is defined in the materialConfigurations.

Much guesswork.

You guessed most of it right I think.
The collision box and the rest of the json code (and Unity) do use XYZ, while Blender uses XZY If it looks whacky it might be that you picture the bed being 2 meters wide, looking at it from the side, when it's basically described from the foot of the bed... ? maybe?

I think the isBed basically tells the game that you should have the "take ownership" and "sleep" options when you right click it in game. I didn't change anything on that line and they now sleep correctly in the bed, so I had to change the positionControl coordinates back uhm... that is, originally they slept in the bed and I changed the positionControl to make them sleep higher. It didn't work. I then named part of the mesh "bed" in Blender and suddenly they were sleeping up in the air, so I changed the positionControl numbers back to what the original file has and now they're sleeping where they should. But I don't really see positionControl being tied to the item being a bed... even if it's in the same modules bit, you can have a lot of different modules that are completely unrelated...

I hadn't noticed that sleeping bags have isBed false, but I suspect it has more to do with the little founders starting to whine about wanting a real bed after a while...

So, the materialConfigurations is where stuff go wrong. I seem to only be able to use already existing materials (from the vanilla game that is), and not any new materials that I create specifically for the bundle... I did try using snow, too, though and that actually didn't work either. Though I guess I might have gotten something else wrong as well.

Also, no wonder you're always banjaxed if you haven't figured out how beds work...

XYZ wise I was going by the the fact that the dimensions of the object bedWoodSimple in Blender, and the order in which the dimensions are listed in the json which goes height, width, length (in Blender being Z,X,Y). 

Are your materials, images, and models organised in the same directory structure as in the sample files?

yes I have the same directory structure

and I'm pretty sure the dimensions in the json file is width, height, depth.... Though if they're not, that might explain why I sometimes have trouble getting the collision boxes in the right place...

But: "size": [0.8, 0.4, 1.8] from the json file reads to me, the bed is about 1 meters wide (X), half a meter high (Y) and 2 meters long (Z). The boxes being smaller than the items, I might add...

(Edit - and even if Blender uses Z as the height axis, Unity doesn't and json doesn't. Basically the letters change but not the dimensions... or the order of the dimensions... )