VERC: WC Sphere Making Last edited 22 years ago2002-03-28 04:17:00 UTC

How
to Make a Sphere in Worldcraft:

So you want to make a sphere,
eh? Well there are several techniques to make one, but by far the easiest
method in Worldcraft is called the ?cone slicing? method. The basic
principle of the cone slicing method is to take a cone, slice it into pieces
and then scale the pieces up or down to give it a spherical shape.

Lets get started. First you will need to fire up Worldcraft. To begin,
select spike from the block tool make yourself a cone. It should have at least
8 sides if you want your sphere to look spherical, the more sides the more
spherical it will look for a given size.Now you need to set up some template cylinders on the sides
of the spheres to give you a guide of where to slice the cone. These template
cylinders will not actually be in the final sphere, they are just there to guide
you as you are messing with the cone. Since the cone will only be the top half
of the sphere, you only really need half of the template cylinder.From now on, you will only need to deal in 1 2d window, the
one that shows the profile of the template cylinder and the upright cone (y/z in
this example). First resize your cone so that it is the height of the template
cylinder.Now go into the 1 unit grid. Note that you should not use
the 1 unit grid for 99% of mapping, only special situations such as making a
sphere.

In the next step, you will determine WHERE to slice your
cone and this is of critical importance. To find out where you should slice your
cone, drop an imaginary line down from a point on your template cylinder and
find where it intersects the cone. Use the clip tool to slice the cone
horizontally at this location.Next, you will have to scale the pieces of the cone to
match the form of the template. This is done using vertex manipulation. Now
select all the ?middle? verticies of the two pieces of the cone. This is
most easily done by making a bounding box around all of them. If you click on
verticie by vertecie then you will only select the verticies for 1 piece instead
of both.Now to move the verticies up! Now that all of your
verticies are selected, grab the CENTER verticie and drag it up until the shape
fits the template. Be sure to grab verticies that are literally on grid units
when dragging all of the verticies or else everything will snap to grid in weird
ways which will make all of your objects invalid. )-:now you have ? of your sphere. All you have to do is turn
it upside down and you?ll have your full sphere. Be sure to delete the
template cylinder as well. The sphere made in this tutorial only uses 4 rows and
8 columns, so it?s kind of ?blocky? looking, but its at least ok:Remember, the number of sides your initial cone has
determines the number of columns the sphere will have, and the number of sides
your template cylinder has determines the number of rows or ?stacks? that
your sphere will have.

Beware, if you resize your sphere and stretch it about, you
may get invalid objects due to floating point errors so it is best to make your
sphere the size you want it to be the first time instead of using a prefab
sphere and resizing it. This is especially true with higher-poly spheres.

The following is a sphere I made with 12 stacks and 12
rows, you can see ho much better it looks:If you are going to be making different parts of the
sphere into different entities then you might consider putting the ?null?
texture on the inside faces of the sphere in conjunction with Merl?s modified
ZHLT ( http://www.chatbear.com/uploaded/1011059245-nulltex.zip (Link: 1011059245-nulltex.zip) ).