From Start to Finish..... Head Meshing



Meshing the Head (page3)

		For the first strip, I make my cylinder. Then I proceed to bend it along the bun, following the side view as a guide. To do this, I zoom out using shift-L to see the work easier. I'm going to scale it down now, to fit into the bun better, dragging the ends into the head mesh to make it look like it was tied into the bun. I also have to rotate it out, like it does in the picture. So moving each cluster of the cylinder, I'lll form it to the bun untill by looking in the preview window, there isn't any space and the cylinder doesnt vanish into the head where it shouldn't. It's tricky, and it's not perfect, but it's pretty close.
		To make this alot less stressful, the best thing for this is to select the whole thing (do that in the groups tab) and then go into the edit menu and duplicate it. Then I get back into the menu and use the "vertex mirror left--right" option. This will copy it right to where I want it. Now the rough meshing of the bun is done. Time to texture map it. I'll do it now to get it out of the way.
Since I have a stick in the hair now, and didn't have one when I made the head .bmp ealier, I'll just add a strip of yellow-tan to the .bmp real quick in the head .bmp by the red ribbon. A quick adjustment. Now I'm ready to load it up. I select the whole mesh, stick and all, because I'm going to use the same texture for it all. The easiest way to do that it to go up into the Edit menu and use the "select all" option. It's important that every line and vertice in the mesh be selected when grouping and texture mapping, or it just won't do it. Now, to get the texture to show up on the model so you can map it, go into the Materials tab. From there, you will see the button that either says "none" or " \|" depending on your version of MS3D. I just finally updated my version the other day, which by the way, doesn't cost anything, all version upgrades of MS3D are free, once you register. How great is that for 20 bucks? Anyways, that's a browser button. Use that to locate the .bmp you want to use to texture map the head to. I located my head .bmp in my Shi project folder. Then the little white ball should show the texture on it if it loads up properly. From here, go to the bottom, and select "assign" to assign the texture to it. Don't worry about renaming the texture name to match anything, that's not important for here. To view the texture on the model in the viewport, right click on it, and select the "textured" option. And right now it looks a little bad. But don't worry, texture mapping will fix that .
The first thing I will map is the stick. I make sure the stick is selected, the whole mesh is red. For this, sinceI have so many cylinders, I make sure that's the only thing selected. The mapper is in the windows menu, and it's called the "texture coordinate editor". When I open it up, it looks like this:

	My goal is to shrink it down to just the yellow-tan strip on the .bmp, so it will only read that part instead of the whole thing like it is now. So using the scale option, I scale it down to just that. Looking back at the model preview window, I can see that it worked. And the stick has now been mapped.
I use the same process for the ribbons except here, for simplicity's sake, I'm going to regroup them first, before mapping. Selecting both cylinders in the Groups tab, I then select the "regroup" option in the tab, and rename that group "ribbons" just so I know what it is. You can rename whatever group you want if you like. It won't hurt much. I map the new group to the little red square on the .bmp and now the little add-ons are done.

My goal is to shrink it down to just the yellow-tan strip on the .bmp, so it will only read that part instead of the whole thing like it is now. So using the scale option, I scale it down to just that. Looking back at the model preview window, I can see that it worked. And the stick has now been mapped.
Now export it to your project folder, because this part is done for now. Save it as something easy to remember, like "bun" or "head1". Export it as an wavefront OBJ.