Exporting sectors as 3d models

Why would you do that? Well, here's why I do it:

Convenience. You build your thing once and that's it. With sectors, you need to cut other sectors, align textures, etc. Imagine building a lamp over stairs. Your lamp will be sliced. Now, imagine you move a building and all your lights become misaligned. Models save you from that. Textures are perfectly aligned every time, and you don't slice your things. Plus, you can move models in ways you cant move sectors.

Then, you can create impossible geometry. Imagine a 1 unit rod sticking from the ground at 45 degrees. Do that using 3d floors. Can you? No. 

With models, you can.

If you can create 3d floors and edit text files, you can export 3d models.

Tutorial:

Create a dummy sector in your map to hold your model, and build it. Delete all textures. Only the model should have textures. Very important!!!

It's a simple one sector build. 

Select the sector with your thing in it and export it as obj

FILE>EXPORT>SELECTION TO WAVEFRONT.OBJ

Look at the way the paths are set.

My project folder is named CUTE, and I have subdirectories there:

Models

And

Decorate

Exporting creates a decorate file in DECORATE, and a modeldef file in the root. We need to add an editor number in the decorate, make sure it's included, and then we need to edit the modeldef, because my thing is on its side.

We edit modeldef by adding a couple of lines:

Rolloffset will turn the model upright.

Offset is to center the bounding box. This is a non solid model, so the bounding box doesn't matter too much.

Reload resources, and your thing is now selectable from the menu. If not, add your project folder as a resource.

The map has comments you can read if you open it in utimate doom builder.

LiteBeams.pk3.zip

Moving "light"