Mapping your Sword

Index to all 30 lessons in this Milkshape tutorial 
Define the model into four different groups. Of course, if you feel adventurous I recommend you actually break your model down into more groups so you can get more detail. Experiment! This tutorial is all about giving you the basic understanding. It is up to you to learn, experiment and create!

Defining your groups for mapping

In the Control Panel, under the Groups tab you can see that I have three groups already defined. This was because of the process we used in building shapes. You may have more groups depending on how much experimentation you did.

Select the Geosphere line item (its now blue) then lower down in the control panel under "Group" press the select button. Your Geosphere turns red.

If you are doing your groups differently and want to get more detail by creating specific groups remember that to add faces to a group you use the SHift-left click, and to remove faces you use Shift -right click.

Now press the CTRL+h buttons and the geosphere disappears. This is the hide command. You are hiding the selected group. It is still there. You just can't see it. This makes it a lot easier for you to work on the rest of the model. To make it reappear you press the CTRL+u buttons.

Now do the same thing with the cylinder.

• Select the Cylinder group line item
• press select so it turns red
• PRess CTRL+h to hide it

Now we need to break down our sword blade into two separate groups so we can assign a different texture to each part. We want the crosspiece and the blade to be different groups.

If you remember we had made the sword blade then we extruded the crosspiece. This means that it is all one group at the moment.

In the control panel select the line item for swordblade and the whole model that you see on the screen is selected (turns red).

In the control panel press the select button then lower down select the face option.

Now what I did was unselected from the group all the blade portions. (shift+right mouse) I did it this way because it's easier. The blade is less complex.

You could have just as easily, without the sword blade group being selected pressed the Select button, face option, then Shift+left click on all the faces that make up the cross-piece. Either way your model should now look like this:

Let's make this a group all by itself.

• Press the Groups Tab
• Press the ReGroup Button
• Enter a name in the text box (I entered Crosspiece)
• Hit the Rename button

You now have a new group and all we have to do is get that last group, which is the sword blade.

Hit Ctrl+h to hide the crosspiece group you just made and all you are left with is the sword blade.

Easy enough to select this, you don't even have to worry about the various faces.

• In control panel select the Model tab
• lower down in Select options press the Group Button
• Left click and hold then drag over the whole blade and when you release everything is selected

Now just create this as a new group just as you did with the crosspiece

• Press the Groups tab
• Press the ReGrouop Button
• Enter a Name (Blade)
• Hit the Rename Button

Now when you hit Ctrl+h the blade disappears and the screen is blank. And in the control panel you have four different groups:

Press CTRL+Shift+h to unhide everything. You can also unhide everything by pulling down the Edit Menu and selecting Unhide All.

Your model is back on the screen.

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