I have detached the parts I desire to be smashable and have set them aside. What is left is this blank 'base' upon which I have not modelled the inside components of the vehicle in order to make testing simpler.
This model was built by me for the game 'Emergency 4'. Context for it is that it is at 2.3k polygons and when split apart, none of the parts exceed the 1000 per part limit. The model has been stripped of its original textures and relplaced with a checkered 128x128 texture so I can see if any UV mapping gets destroyed in this process. UV mapping has not been touched though.
Upon export into 3ds from Zm2, I seem to have lost all my textures.
Looking at the material editor shows me otherwise. Doing a quick render also confirms that the mapping and textures are still there, but just not visible in the user or perspective viewports.
The model currently relies on .png's because Zmodeler cannot load .tifs. I have been able to reassign the textures to some tiff equivalents inside of the 'tiffrgb' folder in 3ds, but the textures still do not appear on the model.
In my initial attempt yesterday, I disregarded this and went on to the steps mentioned in BeMax. Exported the 3ds file under the same name as everything else, made sure that the texture and materials all had the same name (while staying under 10 characters)
Ran it through BeMAX with a few issues. It seems to be asking for a map even though it (seemed) to have them already in 3ds.
Then when put in Plaything2, it is also textureless. I'm ignoring the axis issue because I think I have worse problems than that.
Assigning the tif textures to the vehicle either makes the program crash, or nothing happens.
I did not go further after this due to the high likelihood that the game would CTD.
My plan is to create models specifically for Carma2 once I complete this test process. I enjoyed this game a lot as a child and only returned to it recently, this time, armed with foreknowledge of modding, modelling and some scripting. I have a few ideas that I'd like to put into this game.
Spoiler: