Making your own models for your Video Game

This is a very important step in your development as a video game maker! If you have completed one of the other tutorials on making games and have now moved on to modeling congratulations!

Before we actully move on to the actual making of a model we have to first discuss a few things about what modeling is and how it is used.

Note: This tutorial on Milkshape has 30 lessons - if you are familiar with Milkshape you can go to the lesson index and pick and choose what you want to learn about. If you are new to the program then I recommend you just continue on with the lessons. Each lesson has a link at the bottom of the page that will take you to the next lesson.

3d Modeling

3d Modeling is the art of creating models that can be understood by the game design and development software. These models have to be made in 3 dimensions. So you can rotate and look at them from all angles.

Often times you will also want to animate these models so they move. You might want actions like swing a weapon, jump, swim, wave, shoot a weapon or anything else you can imagine.

So how do you create a model?

You use a program like Milkshape 3d. There are actually many many different progams you can use to make game models and we are going to use milkshape 3d because it has a 30 day free trial period and because it is very easy to use in conjunction with Genesis 3d and reality Factory.

If you learn the basics of modeling with milkshape you will have set yourself a nice foundation for easily learning other programs.

When making a 3d model your milkshape gives you a workspace to work in. Here is the milkshape workspace with a model of a dwarf and his axe ready to be worked on.

This Model was downloaded from 3D-Resources.com
http://www.3d-resources.com and created by Psionic

This workspace gives you a lot of tools (along the right) and also shows you four different views of the model. Front, side, top and skinned. Skinned is the white version in the lower right.

If you take a close look at the picture above you will see three very important color coded things inside the dwarf.

First off there is the red color, then you see a bunch of blue circles, and deep inside the dwarf you see yellow lines. These are the basic structures of the model.

Let's Learn about these three basic structures of modeling Continue