From Start to Finish, Making a Sim---Acessory Meshing Page 3




There are 2 ways to do this: I can make the blade from scratch or I can flatten a sphere and move the vertices around as I see fit. Since I'm trying to teach here, I will make it from scratch. (Yay!) Go into the "model" tab and select the vertice option. This is kind of going to be like a game of connect-the-dots (la-la-la....) so I will make a basic shape with these dots. Here is my dot drawring when I am done. I tried to keep the dots paired up to make it easier to make faces.
		Make faces? No not those kind. 3D faces. The kind that solidify a 3D wire-model. The kind that are the canvas for the texture to make a skin for it. The kind like I made earlier when I closed off the ends of the staff. To make those kind of faces, select the "face" button in the model tab. Then I will make triangles out of every 3 vertexes, and overlap them, in a manner of speaking, so there are no holes. But there is a catch: NOTE: when making objects from scratch, connects the dots clockwise AND counter clockwise on the same triangle to make a face for each view. Otherwise you could have a great set of wings untill your sim turns around and then they vanish. Done it.
I will connect the dots once clockwise on my little triangle and then again counter-clockwise. (I didn't make the rules up, I don't know why it works that way, it just does.) To check that all the dots are connected, right click on the 3D model window and uncheck the option "draw backfaces". If you missed any, they will show up here. Just rotate your creation around and inspect from all angles. Now, to make your new creation a separate group, because right now, it's part of the staff, go to the "select" button and check the option "faces" to make sure you select all the faces in the new part, like the blade. Then go to the "groups" tab. Select "regroup" and then rename it to whichever section it should be, like I will rename it "blade". To make sure you selected the right parts or that it worked right, click the select button in the groups tab. The new group should select and unselect. If not, make sure that when you selected it first in the model tab, you selected ALL the faces, not just the vertices. The entire prospective new group should be red, lines and dots total. Now when you regroup it, it will become an entire separate group. Why all this fuss over grouping? For the texture mapping, silly! Can't map it by itself if it think it's still part of the staff! So I select the blade in the groups tab, bring up the editor window and scale, rotate, and move it into the white section of the bmp I made for the blade. Done. But there is a problem. I'm trying to look at it with the textured view like I did for the staff, but....It just look like a black blade. Not quite the silver I had in mind.
			If this happens to you, I can't explain it, sorry. If I could, I would know how to fix it, though it seems to happen mostly on small extras, like a blade. I made wings a long time ago, and they turned out fine. But in this case, it's not ok. I need a silver blade. So I delete that group and try to make it out of a sphere. Pre-made shapes don't seem to have any problems retaining color. This isn't a perfect art. There may be times when you have to re-make something 4 or 5 times to get it to come out right. I spent days on Darth Maul, trying to get those horns and long tunic right.
To minimize the vertices and faces for conversion with SKN2OBJ (remember it can only convert a certain amount!) I will adjust the sphere a bit. Since I am just going to flatten it anyways, I only need 1 slice, and the 6 stacks should be ok as they are. It looks kinda goofy right now, but it will be better soon.

	I select it all and scale it flat. Well, mostly, I'll leave a bit of meat on it so it won't dissapear when it turns sideways. From there on out, I select and manuever the outside vertices into the shape I need (make sure the vertices option in the "select" button is checked). If the size gets a bit out of control, don't worry about it, it can always be scaled down. The important part is getting the shape right. Also for repetitive tasks like select and move, give the auto-tool a shot. It will use the last 2 commands you gave, like select and move, and save alot of time. I have it scaled down, formed and moved into place. I select the sphere in the groups tab, assign it the naginata bmp in the materials tab, texture map it in the editor, and now it's looking a whole lot better!



Just need ribbons now. I will make those out of cylinders, 1 stack since I am just going to flatten it, and 6 stacks to make a nice little bend in them. I think you know the drill now, so here is the finished product, mapped to the blue section at the bottom of the naginata .bmp. The only small additional thing I did, was to make a bend in the ribbons so the weren't just sticking straight out like a plastic flag. I curved them around the staff a bit, and I duplicated the one ribbon into 2 to cut down on my work time.

Now that the whole thing is finally put together, before I export it as an .obj, I need to make sure that the materials are properly named. In the materials tab, I make sure I changed the "material1" to the name of my bmp, naginata. When it exports, it will write that kind of stuff in there and when it becomes a .skn, it will look for the bmp named naginata. And also before I do export it, I have to also make sure I have it placed right and sized right, or it will be a waste of time since I will have to come back here and redo it. So first I load up the body to check it.