Nuke

im working on a set of half meter parts to use for doing orbital maneuvers and other non-launch operations. but im kinda stuck on the gimbaled engine. i got the engine modeled as 2 parts with the gimbal joint aligned with 0\'0\'0. im not sure if this is correct or what to name the parts or if there is any kind of other setup required. gimballed thrust works but i cant seem to get my engine to rotate like the stock engine. im modeling under max 8, and im not sure what collada plugin im using. i would have normally imported the stock gimballed engine and checked out how that was set up and set mine up accordingly with respect to naming conventions and mesh center, but i cant seem to import the stock model (my plug in is not supporting the collada version used on some parts). i did however look at the dae file in a text editor and got what i think are the mesh names, which seem to be obj_gimbalMesh and obj_anchorMesh, i tried those names but they didnt seem to work. is there any other configuration that needs to be done here?

what about using dxt textures directly? it would save a lot of processing at load time doing conversions to the proper format. i can understand needing to match video card caps but for most kinds of textures (particularly diffuse), dxt1 or dxt5 will do, and those are supported on practically everything. you might have issues with normal maps. bc5 is superior to dxt5nm (its essentially 2 dxt5 alpha channels), but its a newish format thats not supported on older video cards, and it would be bad to convert from one lossy format to another. png is nice and all but its really not a texture format, and the game is gonna convert it anyway. not to mention both ati and nvidia have conversion tools for free, so its not like its gonna make the modders life all that difficult. just my 2 cents.