Lesson 5: "Bodypainting" or "Why your skin isn't green...oh, it is?!"

 

Or "Why marsians are supposed to be green, and why camoflage is good for discovering units"... :)

 

In this last lesson we'll texture your unit and I'll tell you some tricks how to improve the looks of your unit...

In 3dobuilder, you see the textures on the right hand side like here on the pic:

You see that you can access diffeent groups of textures with the pull-down menu above. Then you see the textures inside the window below. To assign one of the to a face of your model, you got to select the object you wanna texture in the object-tree. Now take a look at the lower-left hand corner:

At the "Faces" register you see a bar where you can select the face you wanna texture, you can turn the texture on the face with the orientation pull-down menu, and you also see the texture assigned to this face there. In this example the face 9 of 12 of this object carries the texture CL01a (Arm camoflage!). To do the same for your model, you select the object, then the face you wanna texture, and then you double-click on the texture to assign it. Easy, isn't it? Like that you can texture your whole model. If the texture doesn't fit because the direction is wrong, you can use the orientation menu to turn it. Try it, it's easy.

For beginners it's often hard to texture every single face of a model, that's why there is a very comfortable option called "area-texturing". I you want, for example, the whole body textured with arm camoflage, you assign the arm camo texture to one of the faces and then click on the "Apply..." button:

This window will appear, which is, in my opinion, self-explaining.

If you don't wanna use a texture but a color as texture (For example bright yellow for a flare), you can click on the "Color..." button and select the color. That is very easy.

3dobuilder+ 2.0 got a textured opengl-view where you can view your model. You can also press F5 to export your model to the TA unitviewer. That is useful to see the approximate size of your model in TA. If it appears huge, you can resize the whole model by pressing "Scale all objects" in the "Special" menu. Then you got to enter a value. For the people less good in maths: A value of, for example, 0.6 means that your model will have 60% of it's current size afterwards. 2 means that it'll be twice as big as now. You can resize it as often as you want.

Now some tips how to make the texturing look better:

If you make an ARM/CORE model, try to imitate the Cavedog style and use the armcamo for arm vehicles and the core vehicle textures for the core ones. It is a good idea to look at a cavedog unit to see how they textured them. Area-texturing is okey when you're a beginner, but later, when you know all the textures it's far better to texture every single face - I do all that, even if the model is huge, and that's why the Task Force units look as good as they do.

You always got to care what your model shall be - and texture it so that the skin supports the model. You wouldn't texture a human green and a dog yellow if you would have to, am I right? Try to be realistic and your models will look realistic and believeable... and now I'll stop talking and let you make great models. I hope this tuorial helped you a little bit - but please: There is still a lot I didn't tell you and a lot to discover. Don't be satisfied, try the things out, make your own experiences - that's the best way to learn!

Good luck!

 

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Wizzball