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ok to the point:

hp_fire nulls, do they need to be placed inside the DummyRoot.

do hp_fire nulls need to be merged with the other models.

do they need lowrez_ and/or collisons?

do they need to be skinned?....jk,jk,jk

hmm, thats all, for now.

you can place them inside or outside, test what looks better.
i think the fire point for laser weapons looks better outside and for rockets its better inside.

you cant merge NULL`s and mesh i think (i get an error, when i do this)
but you have to set up a hierarchy if you add a firepoint to a moving turret.

you need no lowrez or collision, you can see the NULLs ingame

how would you skin a NULL.


i hope you use NULLs in XSI and not a msh for the firepoints

"you cant merge NULL`s and mesh i think"
With other words..: When you mix grass and bread - you'll get glass!

And more seriously

a Null isn't a 'physical' element, so it won't have any shape anyways. So it will never be rendered. It's used to set up stuffs such as i.e. joints for simple robots where you apply one or more model to this and it will work like the wires for a puppet

And you can't merge 2 completely different elements - like I said before, you're trying to get glass by mixing grass and bread together...

And everything needs to be under the DummyRoot, but as Dragonum also said you might like to add a little more hierachy.

Nonetheless, you wouldn't need a low-res collision as said before - and no; you can't see Nulls ingame, and therefore you wouldn't skin a null You won't skin a collision either as it won't use anything but the static 'feeling' of how the shape is

a mesh also works for 'hp_' as it will 'just' use the center of that mesh if I'm not mistaken. (might also just use the Pivot, but it's never been tested out... besides, the final effect would simpliest be focussed on the center of the mesh aka the coordinates)

I agree with the positions for lasers and missiles, though

I think this covered the most?

thnx, but i marked the skinning question as a joke!

yeah as long as they have the hp_ prefix they get preserved and its also necessary for making hps that move with the animations since you have to put them child to the bone they follow and they have to be keyed on the same frames as thier parent bone as if they were a bone but the hp_ prefix keeps as hps.

I just made some hard points for the weapons on the ATR6 model I am doing, I just used a 4 sided cone reduced in the model properties (not scale transform) to a height and radius that looked pleasing without being too big moved them to where I wanted. Then I put them in the dummy root and hid them (press H key while item highlighted). I also found out that if you rotate them it will change the direction the weapon fires, had the torpedoes coming out of the bottom of the ship . What I can't remember off hand if they are like collision primitives where you cannot use freeze transforms on them as it takes away their primitiveness and they won't work properly in game. Just gave them names like hp_gun_1.
Exported munged and started shooting things.

You can't freeze transforms because that will set the objects center to (0,0,0), causing the weapon to fire from that point.

but you can set move center to bounding box in the transform panel, and thisll move the axis to the center of the hp. if you want things just to be simple without having to do all this just use nulls.

yeah as long as they have the hp_ prefix they get preserved and its also necessary for making hps that move with the animations since you have to put them child to the bone they follow and they have to be keyed on the same frames as thier parent bone as if they were a bone but the hp_ prefix keeps as hps.

Oi, Mini' - you didn't set one comma or dot except in the end... making it pretty difficult to understand..

And Coda, I'm pretty sure you didn't write the 'jk,jk,jk' when me and Dragonum posted...

I hope this helped!