Unfortunately i failed in "exporting" the nexus ships. I couldn't get the tools to work, or the tools dont like vista, or windows 7. Plus there was nothing that exported the textures. Regardless that is another topic.

Bumping this topic because i am seeing too many lost souls on the modding forum.

Well, as you can see by the threads title change I am revamping this thread to basically cover everything to do with modding SoaSE.

I added articles on converting bin to text, using convertxsi, embeded a couple texturing videos and added lots of links and other info.

Hopefully I did not miss giving credit to all the helpful modders and will continue to add to this thread with any pertinent information as I find it. 

Contributions and questions are welcome.

This will help myfist, Thanks!  

So how soon on the Maxscripts???

Yeah same here!

Hey myfist0, how did you go with the Akkan? I haven't been able to get the UV's right on that. The rest are all good though.

Rotten hell 

Looks like my textures are inside out.

The KOL word at the top of the ship is backwards. Oh well back to the drawing board.

Yeah, from the looks of it the biggest problem is with normals on this.  Those tricky bastages

"I think Aractain is working on a script to fix this issue. I'm not sure, hope so."

I am working on a script that imports/exports and makes things much easier to work in max (not version 7 unfortunatly it dosn't have a load of code stuff I use).

And that looks like you are indeed using the wrong face winding (i.e. inverted normals). The old x and z swaperoo of each face fun for loop.

Infact didn't those three guns and and the sticky out shelf used to be on the left before? Seems XSI uses the same handedness of max so you need to swap all the points and vert positions and normals etc etc also?

Yeah, for importing that would be the best solution. Its the same thing its just already coded for you, lol.

The symmetrical copy does work but if you need to flip the nulls it inverts them. Weapons and Exhaust point in  .

I unchecked "Freeze negative scaling" and the nulls look OK now.

another double post. Thanks again forum boobs

What I do is import mesh to max, export straight to obj., import into XSI, rotate X axis 90 deg. so the front of the model points in the same direction as the Z axis arrow, transform model along X axis, symmetrise model, delete original, transform model back to centre, do tangents & what ever other changes intended, export to .xsi, convert to mesh then copy the points from the original SoaSE mesh files into it. Tested and works good, in fact somewhere along the line I end up with less vertexes, triangles and a smaller file size than the original SoaSE file as an added bonus.

This method may be fine for what I was doing, but I can see if you have made a model with max, that no mesh file already exists with the points already done, you are having to do all the nulls again in xsi.

Thanks SuperZ, I did test a few in game b4 noticing the backward writing and it was less polys. I think its the optimize in ConvertXSI. You can also use --nooptimize.

I do like to get the nulls in XSI so I can see wats wat tho. Going to mess with it a little more. Thanks again