lex_talionis wrote:how does one get a docking slit in the end of a cylinder? cos atm the best i can do is get a sort of 'docking hole'..
also, is there some way to find out the dimensions of the model?
for a more complex solution you could look to the Gritty Coriolis, but for an orthodox way, docking "hole" is exactly right. cutting out the 192x64 rectangle, selecting it, and marking the
material as (blue)
hole is all that's needed. the actual slit is added later as a subentity in the shipdata. because of this you'll be grateful to yourself if you fix the walls of the model at a nice round number, so adding the slit would read something easy like 0 0 500 1 0 0 0 (where the wall is at +500.0 on z-axis) then you'd be able to use Giles' preset slit with the lights that come with it.
and remember have this hole area unselected later when you set out to make the skinning map.
don't know any clever method to get the quick dimensions other than the old manual way, selecting only two extreme points of each axis and seeing the difference.
also, if you want to make an environment for ships to fly through narrow places, remember that you'll need to keep the shapes 'uncombined', i.e the smaller core would be your model, and the T-panels would be separate subentities to be attached in shipdata.