Modelling! Created 18 years ago2005-12-25 20:06:48 UTC by Unbreakable

Where do I get side, and front views of objects, along with faces and stuff.

What are you talking about? What program? Most have them standard in the four way view except blender.

Using a good camera? Google Images?

sorry I wasn't clear, I mean pictures, of a car for example. The side, and front view that is.

Wait, theres a term...

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ah reference pictures I think.. :

Googled for reference pics, and I found this:

http://blueprints.onnovanbraam.com/blueprints/misc/gundam/
It has so much!!!

Thanks anyways guys

New problem guys!

How do I assign vertex's to a bone structure? And can I select vertex's in the 3D view? Trying to bring to life a jeep.

(Using Milkshape)

For side views, most modellers look up for some reference pictures (or receive reference artwork) and usually they'll draw some sketches themselves as well. No shiny drawings but simple sketches - they often make modelling much easier (the same applies to mapping, I'd say).

As for your other questions, no, you can't select vertices in the 3D view. There's a selection plugin that allows you to select faces in 3D, and seemingly vertex selection is planned for that plugin, but it isn't there (yet).

To assign vertices to a bone, go to the Joints tab and click on the bone you want to assign vertices to. The bone will get selected once you click on it in the list, but that's not so important right now. Just make sure that the bone is highligted in the list. Now, select the vertices you want to assign to it (easy shortkey is F1, 1 (F1 for the selection, 1 for the vertex mode)). Now go back to the Joints list and click the Assign button (be carefull not to select another bone because it will cause your selection to be lost, because then that bone will be selected). That's all.
If you need to assign a lot of vertices to a bone, do it in parts and hide the already assigned vertices with Ctrl + H, to prevent confusion.

Just a tip: hide parts of the model when you're not working on them to make selection easier. I often hide the vertices of those parts only so I still have an idea of how my changes fit with the rest of the model.

ok thanks for your help.. although, I figured out a way to select vertex's in the 3D view.. simply hold down Alt-Shift while clicking..

anyways, yea, hiding would work good, only thing is, I grouped only the wheels, and the body, now I can't get them ungrouped.. plus, it's going to take for ever to group every thing again.. :

Right now, I'm adding foglights to the top..

ok thanks for your help.. although, I figured out a way to select vertex's in the 3D view.. simply hold down Alt-Shift while clicking..

Ah? Nice... I didn't know that Alt button behaviour. Thanks.
About selecting: the Shift isn't necessary, it only adds the selected vertices to the current selection. The left mouse button selects things, the right mouse button deselects things (and without pressing Shift for that, it deselects everything).

It's a good practice to put seperate objects in different groups, both for easy selection and for texturing purpose. That may be hard to do now but you learned something...

ah, righto, thank.

Got another problem thats been bugging me for the longest time, well, ever since I started, everyonce and a while when I try to make a face out of 3 Vertices I'll get the error Please Select exactly 3 Vertices
But I go and check to make sure I only got three selected, and I do.
To fix it, I usually just delete it and redo it, but some times that turns into alot of work if you know what I mean.. lol
Heres a screenshot, sorry about the quality, I was in a rush:

btw, anyone know any good tutorials on adding joints and and making animation sequences.. I've never ever tried importing my models into the game until now so, yep consider me a noob, please

You've probably created vertices at the same position, or something like that.
Instead of selecting 3 vertices and pressing f, you can also go into Face creation mode (F6) and click on 3 vertices in a row. That prevents your problem (though it takes some planning and sometimes vertex hiding to get the right ones).

Try to use the block, cylinder and other basic shapes as much as possible, take advantage of symmetrical parts (duplicating and mirroring them), to make the process faster.

About joints and animations, take a look at this. Have fun.

ah great tutorial, it explains it well.. trying it out now..

edit:

hahaaa, sweetness! I'm going to have so much fun with this! This is my first time ever animating in this so yep.. Here I go!:D

www.onnovanbraam.com

www.suurland.com

Best bleuprints websites out there.

I have another problem, this one with texturing..

Since I'm making this for half-life, I need 8-bit textures.. correct?

if thats true, well then what do I do, my textures are looking so crappy, for example, I had a nice steel texture, but when I converted it to 8-bit, it ended up being 3 colors, blue, olive green, and grey...

So ya, please help! :

bah, n/m, downloaded Wally, it works well.

There's a program that tricks HLMV and others that it is a 8-bit BMP but actually contains 32-bit pic contents. Not sure what it was though...

Some sort of free pic viewer... hmm...

You did something wrong then, 8-bit equals 256 colours, so you should be able to convert it with succes.

Unless you were using a crappy reduction algorithm. Try using a better program for reducing the colour depth.

yea, thats what I was thinking Pepper, 256 colors, is a hell of alot better than 3.. lol..

Could it have something to do with the palette?
How can I convert to 8-bit using Adobe Photoshop?
Heres an example:Now, got a texturing problem, well, sorta.. earlier when I was adding the bones and joints, I clicked an option somewhere that did something to the wheels causing them to appear black, I thought it would be alright for the time being, but now when I apply my custom wheel texture, I can't see it.. and I can't remember what I clicked.. would you guys know?
Heres an image:

BTW, you know those Half-life plants that light up the world, well how would I make the lights on my model light up the world like the plant?

I'd say, use Wally's batch convertor. It creates a custom palette for each image to keep the colors as close to their originals as possible.

Those weels are probably flipped inside out. Turn off backface drawing and see if they disappear (or, actually, you get to see their inside but not their outside). To fix this, simply select the wheels and press Ctrl + Shift + F to flip the face normals.

As for lighting, that's going to take some coding. It has little to do with modelling.
Actually, the code uses bones as attachment points, you may want to decompile the plant model and look in the .qc file to see how that's done, but in order to use these attachment points, it'll take some coding.

ok, thanks for the help on the light. As for the wheels, I still can't get it.
I now have the whole jeep textured but the wheels.:

Did hiding backfaces make the black parts of the wheels disappear?

yes, but it also turned them inside out..

Then they already were inside-out. Select them all and hunt for the "reverse face direction" function.

PS: no hunting required. Captain P already told you what to do.

haha, thanks, as soon as you said that I remembered it..lol.. I'll probably be back with more problems when it comes time to compile.. lol

edit
there now its all textured thanks to you guys!
Now time to animate.. now I know how to animate a sequence etc, but how do you name the sequence and such?

also, what can half-life handle?

heres the stats of my model:

You must export each animation to a seperate .smd file and select the animation option while exporting. Then, in the .qc file, you refer to these animations. Look in an existing .qc file for an example.

ah, ok, thats good to know, I was on the right track, ok thanks..
now, you guys know anything about using addictive textures?

also found a great tutorial to read up on about the qc files..
I'll add my light, you watch me.. haha lol

http://articles.thewavelength.net/170

Now I'm trying to compile it, but its not working:
I'm getting this error:

********** ERROR **********
too many vertices in model: "hlcar_reference"

BTW, heres the Textured jeep, all textures by me!

How many vertices do you have, then?

About transparant textures, there's an article on the VERC about it and it requires a custom version of studiomdl, which isn't downloadable at the VERC anymore but I've still got it if you can't find it elsewhere.

Nice jeep, bytheway. You could add some more distinctable detail to the textures though, some contrast would do good methinks. Nevertheless, looking good especially for a first model.

Nice jeep, hl can only handle 2048 vert's. So there is your problem, try deleting some of the faces that wont be seen or are not really needed.

ok pepper, thanks for the input same with you CP, although, it is'nt my first model I ever made, more less the first model I have ever textured and added animations for halflife.
Anyways, yea, I'll get rid of the faces.
Heres the stats so far:Oh and Captain P, can you host that file for download somewhere for me, thanks.

Nice jeep Unbreakable... but as everybody said before, it's too complicated for Hl1.

Yeah, there is some way of hacking around it, The TT mod uses all the weapons in a single model. So there must be some way around it.

yea, I ended up taking everything off of it. including the seats

Plus all the texturing needs alot more work. I'm putting in very low poly seats for now.

Cut down on the smoothness of those cylindrical shapes, especially the wheels take a lot here as far as I can see. Those eat poly's like popcorn. Anyway, could you post a wireframe shot (and a wireframe overlay shot perhaps)? That could give us an indication of where you can cut down on poly's without loosing too much detail.

The maximum sides a wheel needs is only 10/12 sides. If you would cut down on that you could save easily 500 poly's. Probably more.