Part 3.2
- Attaching skin to the model:
I
hope you got a model on your Milkshape-screen now, that looks like
this
one:
Now
we'll attach skin and clothes. First we have to create some groups
of faces
to seperate the modell into areas that'll get different textures.
For that we
start marking the left arm and switch to 'Group'-register
where we see one
entry, the smoothgroup from before:
Now
we click 'Regroup' to assign the selected arm to a new group that we
rename
by using 'Rename' and the backspace-key to 'leftarm'. Again
click Rename to
let appear our new group inside the selection above.
To ease the further work
we activate the 'Hide'-button to say goodbye
to our arm. That way we create
the groups armright, legleft, legright,
head (without face), face (the part
that we extruded +5Z), hip (small
part above the legs) and chest (thre
rest):
To
make the other parts visible again we choose 'Unhide' from
'Edit'-menu.
Now it's time to think about the look of the single groups.
We wish to attach
the skin (skinmeshing). Take these textures for the first
time, that we attach to
Blockhead together (do not download these pics but
click 'em with pressed
shift-key to get a ready-to-use
*.bmp).
chest |
tanga |
hair |
face |
These simple textures are only to practice, with a little fantasy you can
create
much more cool skins. First we choose the group 'chest' and make sure
that
nothing else is selected. Click 'Select' inside the 'Group'-register.
The chest
should be marked. Now go to 'Material'-register:
There we first click 'New', then 'None', and browse to the file
'chest.bmp' that
you just should have downloaded here. Now 'Rename' and enter
'chest',
'Rename' again and then 'Assign' to finally attach the skin.
Now
we'll adjust it inside the 'Textur Coordinate Editor' to move the texture
for
the chest (that we amateurishly take for the back too) to the proper
position
(choose it from 'Window'-menu):
Be
careful with that tool (no heavy clicking, it looses its relation to the
object
then). First we choose the group that we wish to texture, 'chest',
inside the top
selection field. The texture that is assigned to this group
should appear inside
the larger area, 'chest'. Now we set the area, in which
the chest should be
painted by selecting 'Region' and dragging a frame onto
the texture.
Then click 'Remap' and the grid of our chest should appear onto
the texture.
Now we can do the needed fine-tuning by f.e. 'Move'ing the grid
to the proper
position. Sometimes it could be useful to change the direction
inside the
second selection-field, all directions are available. Comfortably
attach the
chest-texture to the arms and legs too, try to rotate the arms to
texture them
horizontally. The 'head' gets 'hair'-texture and the face
'face'. Blockhead gets
pants too, a jute-tanga with the tanga-texture. All
groups must be assigned
one after another. My Blockhead now looks like
this:
I
know, not very pretty or overwhelming, but not bad for the beginning. By
using more faces, groups and textures the possibilities are nearly
endless.
If you tried to save your model as *.act-file, you will have been
disappointed
by this message: "Found vertex with invalid bone!". That means
our
humanoid still is as soft as a snail, he's in need of a skeleton. How to
do
this is described in the next chapter.