Other Frame Types

Other Frame Types

Everything the Add ▸ 4DS menu builds that has a page of its own elsewhere is linked from Home. These are the rest.

Occluders

A closed volume that hides what is behind it. Same rule as a sector: it has to be closed, and the export says how many open edges it found. It is written as a bare hull — no materials, no UVs — so material settings on one would never reach the file.

Billboards

A quad that turns to face the camera: freely, or around one axis. The Add menu builds the upright kind, turning around the vertical axis, which is what 199 of the game's 293 billboards do.

Mirrors

A surface that reflects, carrying:

• an authored bound the game culls it by, which it trusts rather than measuring the mesh, and
• a view box saying what the mirror is allowed to reflect — four numbers on the mirror, edited like a dummy's box or sized with Fit View Box.

The panel says which way the surface points: facing, back or tilted. A mirror facing the wrong way reflects from behind.

Lens flares

A stack of sprites drawn along a line from a light. Each element needs a material — the export refuses a flare with an element that has none, and one with no elements at all. Add ▸ 4DS ▸ Sun Flare builds the one the game's daytime skies carry, materials and all.

Projectors

A volume that paints a texture onto whatever falls inside it — a headlight, a lamp pool, a tyre track. Its own page: Projectors.

Lights

The game's own light, with a falloff band and cone angles a Blender light cannot hold, so it is an empty with a panel of its own. A light in a model does nothing until the mission's scene2.bin names it. Its own page: Lights.

Cameras

A camera position, and nothing else: a frame the game can put the view at. In Blender it is a camera object, and only where it stands is written.

Emitors

A particle emitter. The mesh is the particle it spawns, copied once per particle — not the shape of the emitter. How fast, how many, how big and what color are not in the format: the game sets them in code, and only an emitor placed in a mission's own scene spawns anything at all.