Need to manually change texture's alpha channel in GIMP

Open up your .xsi file that you have just created and check whether the info is in there before you converted to mesh. The info is set out a bit differently but you should be able to find vertex and triangle count. If they are 0 in the xsi file also it means that you only had your nulls selected when you exported.

XSI by default should export everything in the scene if everything is deselected. Shift+Ctrl+A should deselect everything, though sometimes I'm sure this doesn't work for some reason.

You can either try exporting it again. Do Shift+Ctrl+A several times before exporting, and it should work(should).

Or you can select everything that was missing in the first export by selecting them in the scene root (press 8). Then export with those selected. Then paste in the point info from your first export file to complete it. I usually do this after they are converted to mesh. because I am more familiar where things are supposed to be with mesh. files.

Additionally you could try selecting every thing under the scene root (press 8) and then export.

Hope that helps some.

Make sure you freeze all transforms before export.

Make sure you freeze the model before export.

Make sure you have everything de-selected before you export.

Definitely did all this, as instructed by Ironclad's documentation.

Okay, well I went through all of your suggestions and tried them, and nothing worked.  And then suddenly I had an idea.

It turns out my problem was that I was using Softimage 2011 demo instead of Softimage Mod Tool.  Apparently the newer software does things differently.  So now I can get the model in-game, all meshpoints fully functional, but now I'm having another problem.

The textures seem to be applied properly to my ship, but for some reason my in-game player color is almost completely blanking them out.  The entire ship is a bright glowing blue, but you can see the textures underneath if you look closely enough.  Anyone know what this means?

look at the team color channel, it probably is all white, but should be black EXCEPT where you want the team colour, but from memory the team colour is one of the things that was moved in 1.12

Yes, it would be the alpha channel in the cl. file. It may depend on what program you are using as to whether it should have only areas where you want team color black or white. Photoshop needs where team color is to be white, all the rest black in the alpha. But I think Gimp is the opposite, I'm not sure.

The alpha channel in GIMP is all black, so I'm assuming SuperZERO0 is right and GIMP actually needs it to be all white.  I use GIMP a lot, but I've never had to edit the alpha channel of an image manually before, and I can't figure it out.  Does anyone know how to get the alpha channel to change from black to white in GIMP?

Ok! Have you a copy of the cl file without the Alpha channel? If so save this as png. Then in the channels window right click in the section under where the RGB channels are and pick add new channel. Call it Alpha channel. You should be able to edit that new channel to how you want it. Once you are satisfied save it to dds.

I tried to make the alpha channel all black (I was wrong, it was all white before) but the resulting file still bathed the ship in the team color.  For clarification, if the alpha channel is black, the entire texture becomes black.  If it is white, the texture appears normally in GIMP.  Either way, the ship appears as the team color anyway in-game.

P.S.  I am just using the normal maps for all the textures, cause I wasn't planning to do speculars.  Could this be causing the problem (i.e. it is absolutely necessary to have three separate textures for the ship to work)?

I think from memory, you do need to allocate some portion of the cl. texture's (Alpha) channel to the team color. I think it only has to be 1 pixels worth but it still has to be there for the game engine.

I'm not sure how it will look with only a nm. texture, I have never tried that. It may appear transparent without any color info, I don't know. Perhaps you do need a cl simply for the team color for the engine.

You probably can get away with not doing a da. a lot of the planets don't have a specular, but again this is something I have not tried. The window lights and areas like that may not have the glow or luminosity and bloom you would like though without it. As with the shininess of the hull.

I did not make this model myself, and it wasn't originally designed for Sins, so I don't actually have a cl. texture, which is why I just assigned the normal map textures (all I have) for everything.  The textures I have are the full surface of the ship, like a decal.

While we're on this subject, I noticed something else wrong with these textures.  Even though they appear correctly in XSI Mod Tool, from what I can see of them in-game (beneath the team color glow), the textures are completely misaligned.

It would suggest that the UV's don't match the texture locations. I only have Mod tool 7.5 so I don't know how different 2011 is. If it is still similar in the texture editor you should be able to check whether that is the case. Select the model in Object mode and press "Alt+7". that will open the Texture Editor and should reveal the UV's. If there is no texture behind them, just a test pattern or blank, open the render tree by pressing "7". In that double click on the Material Node(this may have a different name if it was created in another program) but will be the node the furthermost to the right of the tree. In the pop up that appears, go to the "OpenGL Display" tab and make sure the texture mode is set to "Use specific UV/pair". Then click the "Image Clip" button and select your texture file. Now in the Texture editor you should see the texture file behind the UV's instead of the test pattern and it should be apparent whether your UV's match where your textures are.