From Start to Finish, Making a Sim---Acessory Meshing page 2



Now, I open up MS3D. I load up the body obj, just so my object to be will be scaled right. Otherwise, it might be enormously huge and need to be scaled down alot. This just cuts that step out. Besides, I need to know how long to make the staff. So using the body as a guide, I select the cylinder option in the menu and to keep the amount of vertices as low as possible (remember SKN2OBJ can only handle about 2 or 3 thousand) I adjust the options on the cylinder a bit. I only want 3 stacks, because I can map it simply this way, and only 6 slices, because it will still be round, with that lesser amount of vertices. Check it out here.
	To prepare for the mapping of the texture, I need to adjust a few things. Remeber the gold ends in the picture? Well, I want to keep those as defined as possible, so I am going to lower the middle two sections of vertices to kind of section that off. This is what I mean:
I am also going to need to close off the end of my cylinder, because right now it's just a hollow tube. It will look kind of weird if I don't in Simshow and in the game. To do this, I am going to add faces to the existing vertices. This is easiest when zoomed in so I will make sure I am not using the "select" option (the keyboard shortcuts won't work if you are) decide to use the above view and hold ctrl and shift, while draging the cursor to center the cylinder and then hold shift and L , while dragging the cursor across the window again to zoom in and out. I select the faces option, and I am going to click on the vertices (the dots) to make a triangle, going to directions, once clockwise and then once again counter clockwise on the same triangle. This creates 2 sides of the face. ***NOTE: Sometimes when making an object from scratch, like wings, it's easy to forget to go both directions to seal a face. When you check your work in SimShow, there will be triangles missing. To check it in MS3D, right click on the blue window and uncheck the option for "draw backfaces". Any missing faces will then show up. Or NOT show up as the case were. Some hints on missing faces are here. I do this on the entire top part of the staff, and then select the entire staff and manually rotate it (dragging the mouse on the window) and repeat the same process on the bottom. Now the ends are sealed and viewable.

Now onto the mapping process. I kind of touched on it a bit making the body, but here is where it counts. To map the staff section, you have to select the entire cylinder group. The easiest way to do that is to select the grou in the "groups" tab. Notice how it says "no material"? We're going to change that. Go to the materials tab. Select "New" in the bottom section of buttons. I'm making a new file for my texture. A blank white ball will appear in the window. Now I will go to where it says <none> , select the naginata texture in the browser box and when it's loaded, the little white ball has changed into a ball with my naginata texture on it. I select "assign" down at the bottom and it's now loaded onto the cylinder mesh I just made. To view it, I right click on the blue window, and select the "textured" option in the pop-up menu. The staf now has colors on it, so it all worked. Whoo-hoo! Now that the program has a shape to texture and a texture to do it with, I need to map it. In the window menu selections at the top, I select "Texture Coordinate editor" and this shows up:

Using the scaling and moving option, I scale the staff's wiremesh down to the appropriate area. Then remember how I moved the vertice sections to frame the future gold sections? I do that again here. It finally looks like this:

It can be an obnoxious process at first, but once you get to know the program, it's really not so bad. Promise. But at least the staff part is done. I'm closing the Texture Editor because I'm finished with it for the moment. 2 more sections to go, the ribbons and the blade. I'm going to go with the blade next.