apologies and a request

My apologies for not being as active here as I should... I've lacked the inspiration to do much fractalling lately, and even have less urge to go through the process of uploading things... being off work has kind of increased my mild depression a bit, and winter weather doesn't help things...

Hopefully I'll be getting back into fractals soon, in fact, one of the other projects I am working on right now may at some point coincide with my fractal interest as well, and if so, then I'll probably be doing much more with fractals, possibly in new and exciting (at least to me) ways...

That being said, I have a request... does anyone on my friends list have a good bit of experience using MeshLab or Blender? The reason I'm asking is because I have this mesh object that I want to modify in a specific way. I was able to modify the mesh itself using Bryce's boolean operations and exporting, but when I do it that way, it screws up all the textures in a way I simply cannot repair...

For those of you who have no interest or ability with meshes, you can probably stop reading at this point... for those who may be in a position to assist, allow me to explain in more detail what it is I'm trying to do.

I have lately been working with OpenSim, a simulation program similar to the Virtual Reality of Second Life... but which anyone can run on their own machine, and even connect (via a web interface similar to peer-to-peer networking) to other larger Virtual Worlds. In these Virtual Worlds, it is possible to upload meshes, but the poly counts are severely limited. Most high poly meshes will simply crash the program when you try to upload them...

I was trying to get a mesh of a Klingon Bird of Prey spaceship (from Star Trek) into my Virtual World... and after much searching I finally found one that is low poly enough to load, yet still looks good enough to be worth uploading. The problem is, the model is made with the "wings down" configuration... And I'd like to also have it with the "wings up" configuration as well (or better yet, have the wings themselves as a separate unit, with the point of rotation somehow set to the inner ends of both wings, so they could be scripted to move up or down (but that's a lower priority than simply getting them up in the first place)

I was able to use Bryce and by duplicating the wings, then changing the angles, and overlaying a negative box over the parts of the two "wing-sets" that I wanted to hide, and setting everything I wanted to keep to positive booleans, and everything I wanted to erase to negative booleans, and then combining them all, I got the wings in the "up position"... and in Bryce it renders perfectly, all the textures look fine... but when I export the mesh and covert it to Collada, I lose the textures and then if I try to put them back on the model in my Virtual World, they don't line up.

So I was hoping perhaps one of you modelers, with more knowledge of either MeshLab or Blender, could alter this model for me. I can send the mesh file in whatever format you prefer (assuming MeshLab or Blender can export to that format... it's currently in OBJ format) and then you can change it to fit my specifications, resave it (in either OBJ or Collada DAE formats) and send it back...

Not sure how I could repay you for such work, perhaps we can come to some arrangement. Anyway, if you know enough about either MeshLab or Blender to do such an alteration, please let me know.

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