How to
skin a model in MilkShape. That's what this tutorial is about.
Before we start we need a skin of course. This can be a .jpg or a
.tga file. However if you want to use shaders on your skin you
will need a .tga file. But I'm straying here cause this ain't a
tutorial about skinning itself. If you like you can use the
following piece of crap (by me) that I call a skin for this
tutorial.
shortsword.jpg
If
you can have a real skinner to do your skins for you. DO SO NOW!
In case you wondering why I didn't. Well, I did. Jinx
offered to do the skin. But he ain't done yet. And I would like
to proceed with the tutorials. So that's why.
But
enough with this talking. Let's proceed with MilkShape and it's
skins.
A
skin in MilkShape is called a Material. And as you might have
noticed, the third tab on the toolbar says Materials. Load in
your swordmodel (or a different one) and select the Materials
tab.
We see an empty list, a Material section with a dark square and
some buttons. And below that even more buttons required for
making, editing and deleting materials. We start out by pressing
the New button. The list now says Material01 and a globe has
appeared in the dark cube. Now we need to tell the material
where to get it's skin. Press the top
button and select the picture you want to use. The None button
behind this just removes the path to the picture replacing it
with nothing. This does not delete the material itself.
If all went well you should be seeing your skin on the little
globe like this;
The
material is now done. Only thing left is to assign it to the
model. You can assign each group you have a different material.
So the skin I made could also have consisted out of three .jpg
files. One with the blade, one with the hilt and one with the
handle. And then made three materials and assigned them to the appropriate
groups. Which is stupid of course. Just one file is
much easier.
Select
just the blade of the model in the Groups tab. Then press Assign
in the Model tab (at the bottom). If nothing changes in your 3d
view press the right mouse button and select textured instead of
Smooth Shaded. You can see that your skin is evenly distributed
over the entire blade. But that is not what we want. So that's
where the Texture Coordinate Editor(in the windows menu or
CTRL+T) comes in.
When
we open the TCE we can see our skin. Now we select blade in the pull down
and then we see a bunch of white lines and red dots
appear. This is your model (the bladepart). You probably can't
make anything out of this so let's change that.
Select
Front in the second pull down and then press the region button.
Draw a rectangle over the part where the skin of the blade is
located. Then press remap.
Now
you could see the following.
If
you made the swordmodel yourself and are using my skin it might
not align as good as in the picture. Fortunally it's very easy
to get it right. Just use the select, move, etc. buttons on the
side to drag the vertices to the points where you want them.
This works very easy.
Now also do the same for the hilt and the handle. You will need
to select them first before they will work in the pulldown. They
could be laid out somewhat like this.
I
used the frontviews of the different groups. If you look in the
3d view you can see that the model looks pretty nice. Apart from
some ugly stripes. Like these.
This
is a close-up of the handle. The stripes that you see there are
actually the edges of the skin on the neighboring faces. If you
look in the front view you can see that this side can't be seen
there. It's under an exact 90 degree angle with the front view.
Select just these faces. Just like I did here.
Now
go back to the TCE and select handle from the pull down.
As you can see the faces are lines in the TCE. This is because
in the front view (as I selected in the pull down) these faces
show up as lines. And that's why these faces look fucked. It's
stretching the thin line of skin over the entire face. What do
we do about that? We change Front to Left, draw a region
somewhere and then press remap. It's the faces seen from the
left! Now we can have the faces display something better. Align
the faces in such a way that the skin on the model looks pretty
good.
Note:
DON'T spend hours aligning the faces exactly. It's a weapon
model. When you play with it in game nobody will notice little
flaws in the skin unless they are looking for it. Or when the
flaws are really obvious. If you do want to have a neat model
alter the skin by adding some patches in the .jpg which you can
use to cover up the faces with the stripes.
With
my handle I will just draw a region somewhere in the handle part
of the skin. Just make it look like the rest of the handle. The
fact that you can see where one face start and the other ends is
irrelevant.
Do the same for the hilt and blade. Check if there are no
stripes on faces. If so choose an angle from where you can
clearly see the faces and then map them. After you did that
you're model is considered complete. It's now ready to get it in
a game.
The
next tutorial will deal with how to export the model to .md3
format and then to get it in Quake 3 Arena.
My
final result.
AshRain
