Lesson 4A Skinning the sword

Index to all 30 lessons in this Milkshape tutorial

This is the process of defining which parts of the sword are grouped into which types of colors and textures.

Skinning the Sword

You remember early on in this tutorial I showed you a square graphic of a dwarf? It looked like somebody had put him in a trash compactor and squished him down. That is the skin for the dwarf model. The three dimensional model was flattened out into a two dimensional sheet

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

We are Going to do this process but not yet. There are tools within Milkshape that will allow us to color, skin, create textures and apply them to our model.

Note that there are programs you could purchase that would make this process easier but this tutorial is all about using a little elbow grease and saving some money. So roll up your sleeves and let's dig in.

First thing to remember is that Milkshape doesn't allow you to apply colors and textures to individual triangle it only allows you to apply to groups. Now that doesnt mean you can't have one triangle as a group. You just have to define that one triangle (face) as a group if you need to.

And it is this grouping that we are going to do now. We are going to break this model down into four groups then we are going to build our map out of it then apply our colors and textures.

To do this we are going to need a paint program. I talked a bit about this in the beginning of the tutorial and almost any paint program will work but I recommend you use Paint Shop Pro. It is a cheap and very effective solution for all of your game making and webmastering needs. I have been using it for years.

Important Note: As you are texturing your model the textures may not show up in the 3d blue viewpane. This is the view pane in the lower right. This viewpane has options for showing the textures. Right click on that screen and select "textured" to show textures as you work on your model.

Lets Get going