Construct your table in a build box using Add (and/or subtract) brushes. Give it appropriate textures. I think there's an 8 texture limit for decorations, according to the Meshmaker docs.
Rebuild. Surround your table with a cubical build brush. Right-click on the build brush and select 'Transform Permamently' to reset the Build brushes scaling. Click 'Intersect' and the Build brush will 'Shrink Wrap' itself around your table. Now, you have a single brush for your table instead of several seperate brushes. Try adding it in a room somewhere and check it against a Nali for scaling. (Nali's stand about a foot taller than human players)
Export the brush as a T3D file.
When you run Meshmaker, it will ask you for the T3D file. While it's converting the file, it will automatically look up the texture packages and wrap the textures onto the decoration for you. When it's done, it will tell you where it put the finished package.
Now, start up UnrealEd and load your level. Go to the Classes browser and click 'Load' Load the newly created decoration package. It will appear in the 'Decorations' class. Have fun!
Don't forget, you'll need to include your new models package with your map or the map won't load. According to the docs, it's possible to compile the model directly into the maps 'MyLevel' package, but I haven't been able to make this work, yet. I'd love to learn how to make animated models, too. images/icons/smile.gif
The meshmaker docs list all the pros and cons of using decorations instead of brushes. here are some of them:
<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Why Meshes?
Meshes (or, for our intents and purposes, decoration actors) have some advantages over brushes where it comes to detail work:
First and foremost, the engine can render much more raw mesh faces than brush polys. For comparison, an average player model (which is a mesh) has about 600 to 1200 faces, and the engine has no problems rendering scenes with many players in close view. That means that meshes can be much more detailed than anything you could create from regular detail brushes without a noticable slowdown.
Because meshes aren't part of the BSP tree, they never cause BSP holes or hall-of-mirror effects. When designing a prefab that's supposed to be converted to a mesh, you don't have to bother with grid alignment; same applies for placing meshes in your map.
The engine uses vertex lighting on meshes (as opposed to lightmaps on brushes). That's not necessarily an advantage since lightmaps are much more sophisticated than vertex lighting, but vertex lighting makes meshes appear smoother than brushes. Try that with a sphere, for instance.
Decoration actors are much more versatile when it comes to interactivity in maps: With just a simple property change, you can make them pushable, floating on water, destructible, revolving and more.
But it's not all sunshine, of course. The advantages mentioned above come at a cost:
Although meshes are rendered vastly faster than brushes, part of that advantage is sacrificed to the fact that meshes are always rendered as a whole when they're visible (as opposed to brushes whose individual surfaces are only rendered when they're in view). In virtually all cases it's still a big performance gain, though.
Meshes only support an upright collision cylinder, while brushes have per-poly collision.
The vertex lighting mentioned above is much less sophisticated than lightmaps. On the other hand, the difference is most obvious on large-scale objects which aren't suited for mesh conversion anyway, and occasionally the smoother vertex lighting even is a desired effect.
Not more than eight individual textures are supported per mesh, and textures can't be tiled on mesh faces as they can on brush surfaces. (MeshMaker automatically adjusts texture alignment to work around that limitation.) <hr></blockquote>
[ 12-13-2001: Message edited by: NutWrench ]