[gap]

Originally Posted by Seaowl

@Gap: Thank you.

it was - like you suggested in the modding thread – essential keeping seperate things seperate.
Finally - I don´t know after how much unsucessful attempts (no idea what I was doing wrong in the end) - I got it working:

The lighthouse is now defined as landunit, can be positioned by mission-editor and as landunit the flare ranges after first estimation about 17 km (don´t know how much weather like fog affects the range). Pretty much like the lightship-flare. It´s a nice effect: You first see the lighthouse and after a while the city lights appear.
Have to experiment a little with ParticleGenerator, if range could be extended a bit more. But have to look into some Env-files too. No popping up observed.

Cool!

Originally Posted by Seaowl

Now as your Ecomod-Helgoland is near completion, I should find out the SH5 coordinates of lighthouses like Roter Sand, Hohe Weg, Arngast. But I see the next problem appearing:
These are mostly Offshore-Lighthouses; so I will try what happens, if I turn for example the LSH15 Roter Sand into a sea unit.

When you hoover the pointer on the world map, Mission Editor's status bar should provide information on local Lat/Long (both in deg/min format and as metric offsets). For very accurate object placing you can edit manually .mis files, where unit coordinates are expressed as meters. There used to be a tool by TDW converting from real world coordinated to SH meter offsets, and I can provide you with a spreadsheet doing the same, but knowing that in the SH world 1 degree is equal to 120 km, (1 min = 2 km, 1 sec = 33.33 m) and that the origin is at the intersection between the equator and the Greenwich meridian, you can do the math yourself (negative offsets for southern latitudes and western longitudes).

Laying "land units" on the seabed shouldn't be an issue. IIRC, Mission Editor refuses to place them in the middle of the sea, but you can drop offshore lighthouses on a nearby land area, and then adjust their placement as I described above. Indeed, using this method you will have to adjust unit's height manually, but that's not a big problem either.

On a side note: on 3D Warehouse there are a couple of models of the Roter Sand lighthouse, one of which is nicely detailed, and a lesser detailed but still acceptable model of the Arngast.

Originally Posted by Seaowl

About AO-mapping:
At the moment Blender keeps me busy. To avoid troubles for not having Unified Render Controller, I have chosen a sea unit - namely the Harbour Tug - for first trials in AO-mapping.
Meanwhile I got stuck in renovating and it will take me some time to split up the modell.
I´am planning to seperate hull, superstructure, deckstuff and the mast, taking individual lightmaps and combining them in one AO-map in the end. I think thats the way it is done?
After that I will see whats the trouble with the lighthouse.

Adding AO map to SHIII models is a bit complicated. Unless the model you are importing has entirely non-overlapping UV projections, you need to combine all its parts into one model making sure that every piece goes in its correct position (node translation/rotation must be considered), make a copy of the combined model, resize/re-sort (note: re-sort, not re-do; I will tell you the reason a little below) its UV projections so that they don't overlap with each other, and bake the AO map. At this point you can split again the combined model, making sure that you follow exactly the same steps with its two copies (the original one textured with the diffuse texture and the copy textured with the AO texture). This is important because the two of them must be imported together, and for S3ditor/GR2 Editor to accomplish this task correctly, not only the diffuse and the AO model must have the same number of vertices and faces, but the order of xyz vertex coordinates, uv coordinates and face definitions must be the same for the two sets of meshes. Completely redoing the AO UV map, or accomplishing different modifications (or the same modifications but in different order) on the AO models than on the diffuse models, will most probably scramble vertex and/or face order, thus causing errors in the AO mapping once the models are imported in game.
For your first model imports I recommend you to follow the workflow I described above, but once you grasp its fundaments, you can eventually develop your own method, depending on the tools that you are using

Originally Posted by Seaowl

@Jeff-Groves: Thanks for the hint with the normals. As I understand it, it would be enought to import the lighthouse into Blender and recalculate the Normals?

You are correct

Originally Posted by Seaowl

And some really working Unified Render Controller with transparent water and shadows would be great for sh5.

Sure they would!