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Old 15-08-12, 19:51   #1
teme9
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Default Teme9's texturing & modelling method for enemies and complicated objects

Teme9's texturing & modelling method for enemies and complicated objects

Before you continue this tutorial any further you must need to know how to use Metasequioa, Strpix, Wadmerger and a painting program of your choice (I use photoshop here)

You need:
Latest Wadmerger
Latest Strpix 13b
Metasequioa (I use 2.4)
Painting program (Photoshop used here)
Editwad (for used in part 2 - coming in future)

And refrence photos. The object is much easier to make if you have a refrence photo so you can mimic it.


tips:
Don't use too many polygons - will make texturing really tedious and a lot of textures will make trouble in the future. (the limit of all object textures seems to be 2500... so if you use 500 textures for you object that leaves 2000 textures for all the rest of the objects your level needs)

Start with simple. Don't start doing anything too complicated until you understand what this is about. Make a vase or similar snake head.

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In this tutorial we are going to make a snake head using a Fake 3d painting method.

1. Making base texture (once you master this techinique you can forget the base texture and you can start painting the real texture at first)
We need to make a basic texture for the snake head. It needs to have basic features like a mouth, eye and nostril. They don't need to be 100% accurate but making them makes the job easier.

In this tutorial I used following texture as a base:


You need to keep few things in mind when doing this "blank" texture. The texture needs to include following areas so that the texture will cover every aspect of your model:


After you've done the texture (the white one) Open meta.

2. Getting the texture to Meta
Make sure that you have your material and object panel visible. You can get them to show from here:


After you have your material panel and object panel visible click on the material panel and "New". After that there will be a new material avaible. "Mat1".
Double click it.


Then turn up the emission amount. This "removes" the lightning from your texture (it actually makes it look really bright). After that look for your basic texture (the white one we did in step1). You can get it from the Texture: "Ref". (4.)

Click OK.

3. Putting the texture to use

Select "Primitive" --> Plane --> Create (Make sure from the properties tab that the plane is 1x1).
Now you can see the flat plane with your texture. This is the base you will be cutting and moving around.


4. Creating shapes & cutting the model

Choose "Knife" tool from the left tool palette and cut the flat plane into pieces (Press shift to have straight lines)

You need to think how you will need to fold the plane in order to get you snake head into correct shape. Keep this picture in mind:



Then choose move tool and start adjusting the vertexes and faces until the shape is looking pretty good:


If you need to add more faces use knife tool again and after cutting with it adjust the UV map to have straight lines.

You can find the UV tool from you tool palette.
Then follow the numbers from the picture below:



After doing this you can modify your mesh again until the shape is what you desired.



After that Choose all (CTRL+A) then mirror the mesh.
This way you will have symmetrical meshes from each side. You only need to do textures only for the other side.

Now you need to join the middle vertices together.
http://s32.photobucket.com/albums/d1...nt=panels9.jpg

Remember to choose only the vertices you want to joing together and choose the "Apply selected parts only". You can use different values in the field but the value depends on your meta settings. I used value 5.00. After joining the vertices rotate your model so that it is correctly posed. (top of the head to the sky etc.)

Now triangulate all the faces so that there will be no bend faces ingame:


After this phase you need to move the vertices around until the shape is what you wanted. You can also adjust the UV map too but it is not very useful at this point. After the model looks good triangulate faces. (This makes sure that there are no bend faces ingame - they disappear and look bad)


Here's what I did to the model and UV map


5. Painting and making the real texture

You need to keep meta and your painting program open at the same time! (this is really handy if you have double monitors so you can keep the other program in another and the other in another)
This phase is the phase that will do most of the work. I can't really write tutorial on the painting part but EXPERIMENTING is the key!



This texture will work as your guide. You can clearly see where you need to put your eyes, mouth etc.



Open you "white base texture" in the painting program you know how to use and start painting on it. Add detail, manipulate photos into it and check often in meta! (Just click meta window active and the texture will be refreshed on your model) Save the new texture you're painting on top of the "white base texture". This will cause Meta to always refresh this texture on the model you have open in Meta.

and once finished the texture could look something like this:


And this is how it looks in meta:


And once you're happy with it save your work (in .mqo file and as a .dxf too. .mqo will keep your texture infos in place so you can keep it as a map for later). Use your own .dxf settings to export it for compatible format for strpix.

Now make your texture smaller (keep it smaller than 256x256 max size of wadmerger)

6. Texturing the model

Open wadmerger. Choose you base (I use static object here) Add your painted texture and save.




Open strpix and meta.

Open the UV tab on meta where you can see your texture model. This will be your map how to texture your model. Import your .dxf file to strpix and start cutting the textures from the big texture you imported. (Make sure that you have your "preview" option on so you can see your texture what you're cutting)




Use the small arrows to move your cutting area and make sure that it is almost identical to your UV map in Meta. I suggest doing these from up to down and from down to up. This way you will not mess up the texturing and you can easily keep track what you're cutting next and so on.

And once you have done one row you can use their height as a guide. Now you only need to watch for correct width for the texture from Meta.



Select the texture next to the one you're about to cut so you can easily see the height for it. Keep this up until you've cutted every single texture for the model. And once you've done with it texture the other side (you need to mirror the textures) You can select the textures from the textured side or from the big texture (there will be a small box which says how many textures are selected on the current place. From that box you can select the texture you need)


And here is the head with finished texturing!



Now you can use this head ingame or you can save it and play around with it with editwad.

I'll add part 2 about the editwad in the future.

I hope this was useful. Good luck building!



PART 2 Coming in near future. Part 2 will feature the end of the tutorial which explains how to easily make this snake into working enemy step by step.
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