Right. Ive been meaning to write this tutorial on how to texture models in 3ds max for freelancer models for quite some time now, but i've just not had the chance to do so. So, without wasting any more time, let's dive straight into it, shall we?
The most important thing you need to know about texturing in 3ds max is, you –need- to have patience to do it. It isn’t hard to do, so anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot. It IS time consuming, so you should automatically think to yourself “right, this model is rather complicated, i will devote x amount of hours to this to do the texturing job to the highest quality i can possibly achieve”. If you were making a model for a game, you don’t really think the game lead designer would accept pathetic quality work, do you? So why should the mod suffer, even if you’re doing any mod work for it in your own free time? Remember, everytime you submit a horribly done piece, god smite’s a kitten. Think of the kittens.
This tutorial is meant to teach you the basics of texturing in 3ds max, nothing more, nothing less. As you proceed to use 3ds max, you will learn new techniques and tools, and your experience will grow as you move along. Before you actually begin texturing in 3ds max, there are a number of precautions you must take into consideration.
The mesh must be as optimized as possible. This means no errors such as floating vertices, unwelded vertices or faces, holes or gaps in the mesh, double, triple or quadruple faces one behind the other, etc. Such errors can either have a minor consequence (double faces = increased poly count) or major consequences (floating, unconnected vertices = game crash), and either way, you should keep the mesh as clean as possible.
Furthermore, multiple faces occupying same space can lead to z-buffer tearing and blinking effect as the renderer is uncertain which surface it should render- increased poly count is just one of the consequences.
The mesh must be centered. This will not only ensure that when you finish everything and are ready to export the model as a .cmp for hardpointing etc, there is no problems, plus it will make hardpointing easier (plus, its one of the rules you must comply with for submitting anything for discovery).
Dont do anything unnecessary when it is not required. This is regarding modelling- for freelancer, we want to keep our models’ poly count as low as possible. As a general approximation that i go by, all fighters/bombers/freighters = 1-2.5k polys, gbs and small transports = 3-4k polys, cruisers and big transports = 4-6k poly, battleships, battlecruisers, etc 5-10k poly. Ofcourse, you can go higher, but try to keep in such ranges.
Freelancer ships are most of the time, symmetrical, except for a few (the spatial is a good example) i will explain further down how to ensure there is no problem with the models, and how to ensure your mesh remains symmetrical.
Here is a trick you can utilize whilst optimizing the mesh: customize->customize user interface->look for "Display Edges Only Toggle" and assign some key to it, like "F". when your viewport(s) are in edges mode press "F" and you'll see the hidden lines displayed in punctured lines as opposed to hard edges. Also in the same customize preferences set key for "Display Vertex Ticks Toggle", say "G". This will allow you to see vertices even when you're not in vertex editing mode.
Clear examples of bugs (screenshots provided courtesy of Treeywrm.):
I will be using Mouth shot’s Kusari Cruiser mesh as an example for this tutorial.
The first step involves importing the .3ds version of the model (if you created the mesh in another software), or opening it in 3ds max (if you created it in 3ds max). If you created the model in 3ds max, ignore this step. If you imported the model, you will have to change the orientation of the mesh first before you can do anything else.
To change the orientation of the model, you need to first select all of the meshes. You can press the hotkey for this “Ctrl + A”, which selects all the meshes. You will then need to click on the icon in the top tray that resembles an arrow down a 360 turn around a pivot. This is the rotation tool. To ensure rotation is easy, you should also select another icon that is further right from the rotate icon- it looks like a magnet outside an angle sign “<”. This is a snap toggle, which means when you rotate the mesh, it will turn around the x, y or z axes in degrees of 5.
Ensuring everything else is selected, you can rotate the mesh by clicking and holding any one of the three circular “lines” you see in your viewport (yellow, blue or red circle denoting one of the three axes).
Looking at the mesh, you can see it is currently lying on its side instead of being straight up. So, rotating it around the required axes, you get this as a result
As you can clearly see, the model is NOT centered correctly. This is the next step you need to do. Next to the rotate icon, there is an option called “select and move” when you highlight it, which looks like a four pointer + cursor. Select this. At the bottom of the screen, you can see 3 boxes, next to which is written x, y, and z, and each of these boxes have some numbers in them. You will ensure that all the meshes are selected, and change the value in all the three boxes to 0. This will center the model.
The model is now centered, so the next step involves converting the model to editable poly. To do this, you ensure that all your meshes are selected, then you right click in one of the view ports, go down to the option called “convert to”, and select the option “Convert to editable poly”. This is a key step to texturing models in 3ds max.
The next step is completely optional, however it will probably make your life much easier. Deselect all the meshes by clicking anywhere in the viewport, then click on the mesh, ensuring you select only one of the meshes out of all the others. You will see a new list of options on the right hand side of your screen. Out of all of the options, there is one red icon, in the shape of a cube, which is called “element” when you hover above it. Select that button. Look down the list, and you will see a button called “attach”, and right next to it, you will see a smaller window shaped icon. Click this icon, which will open a new window for you. The new window will show you a list of all the meshes in the viewports. Click the button called “all”, which selects all the meshes in the list, then hit the “attach” button. This will ensure all the meshes are now part of one group instead of having loads of groups everywhere, and this makes texturing a helluva lot easier. Best thing, once you finish texturing, you can detach the meshes just as easily.
Once you’ve done that, click the “element mode” button again to deselect it. The pivot of the mesh should currently reside at 0,0,0 co-ordinates. Just as a precaution, i suggest doing this step even if the pivot is at 0,0,0; it doesn’t hurt and is very easy.
Making sure that the mesh is selected, but the element mode is deselected, as shown in the screenshot below, click on the button to go into the hierarchy mode. Once there, click on the option “affect pivot only”, and click on the option “center to object”. This will center the pivot of the entire mesh at the absolute center of the mesh. Click the “affect pivot only” to deselect it once again, and click the button on the left hand side of the hierarchy button to ensure you don’t accidentally change the pivot again. Click the button to move the mesh around, and make sure the x y and z co ordinates are at 0,0,0; if not, make it happen.
This will ensure that the model is 100% definitely centered correctly now, and you are now one step closer to texturing your model. Once the above steps are done, the next step involves slicing the model in half along the correct axis to reduce the workload regarding texturing as well as reducing the possible amount of errors that may have been missed.
On the right hand side is a dropdown called “modifier list”. Click this, and navigate right to the bottom till you see an option called “symmetry”. Click this button. This will show you a sort of “list” in the tiny window below the dropdown which looks something like:
Symmetry
Editable poly.
The symmetry modifier will help you ensure that the mesh is, as the name suggests, symmetrical.
Depending which axis you wish to apply the symmetry modifier, choose the option from one of the three- X Y or Z. Try all three, till you find the one that works correctly (remember, you wish to mirror the ship along the left and right, so the chances are you’ll need to select the Z option). If you need to flip the symmetry modifier, tick the box, etc.
Once your’re satisfied, right click on the “symmetry” word, and click the option when you see it “collapse all”. This will make your symmetry change to the mesh permanent, and you wont lose it (unless you deliberately undo your work).
Remember, the same rules apply for texturing as they do for modelling- model one half, mirror it across, reduce workload by half, ensure quality is high and errors are non-existant. The next step involves selecting one half of the ship and deleting it. Press the red square icon, which is called “polygon mode” when you hover over it with the mouse (next to element mode), and then click the “select and move” icon so you can select the faces in the viewport. Having done that, select all the faces on either the left side or the right side of the model’s center as shown in the screenshot below, and once selected, hit delete:
Doing the actual texturing of the models in 3ds max:
Again, as i said before, easy as pie, just time consuming. To begin, press the M key to open the material editor. This is where you will be opening textures in first, before you actually apply the textures to your model. Alternatively, you can press the icon with the 4 spheres as shown in the screenshot below:
To open a texture, you need to do the following steps-
Click one of the spheres to select it. Having done that, click on the expandable option called maps below. When you do that, youll see loads of options, the first one being something like diffuse color and next to it a button called none. Click the button. This opens a new window, out of the list you need to double click on the option called bitmap which opens yet another window. This new window is where you navigate to the folder where you have saved the texture you wish to use for texturing purposes.
Once you navigate to the folder where the texture is saved, select the .dds file, and click open. This will open the texture in the sphere, and that is your first texture open, -nearly- ready to be used for texturing. Repeat this and the last few steps till you have all the textures you wish to use open in all the different spheres. Since the model is a kusari cruiser, ill use kusari textures. The first one is found in Ku_capships, and is called k_panel01_256.
I have not opened all the textures i need, since i will not be texturing the entire mesh, just a small section to show how texturing works. You will need to open all the textures you will need in order to texture the model properly- remember, dont just select panel textures, freelancer ships tend to include alot- of trimmings and beautification texture mappings, so you need to strive to work to that quality.
Once youve opened all your textures, you will need to give each texture a unique name. Not only will this help with texturing, its a necessary step before you export the cmp, or youll get errors in your model.
In order to rename the textures to unique names, you need to do the following:
Making sure you have the first sphere selected, click the dropdown where you can see some text that looks like Map #1. You should see two options, click the other option that ISNT map #1. This will take you back to the maps screen, where you first selected your texture. Instead of seeing the none button, youll see some text there- you will see the name of the texture youve currently got opened. In my case, since i have the texture k_panel01_256 open on my first sphere, ill see that texture. The dropdown next to the button called standard is where youll rename your texture to a unique name- i normally just give the unique name as the texture itself, as youll see in the screenshots below:
Once you rename the texture, there is one final step you need to do- this is so that you can view the textures on the mesh in the viewport. There is an icon that looks like a chequered cube- click that
Applying the textures to the mesh and mapping the textures:
Assuming you’ve done all the steps labelled above correctly, you’re now well on your way to actually beginning the actual texturing of the model you’ve created.
Once you’ve opened all the textures in all of the spheres, renamed them, selected the chequered cube to display the textures on the mesh, made sure you mesh is optimized/centered etc, you can begin texturing. You should have a general idea as to which texture you’d like to apply where. For example, i know that the k_panel01_256 is a generic texture i can use for the majority of the mesh, since the ship is made of ‘Panels’, i can basically apply the texture to the entire mesh.
Making sure that the mesh is still selected, you simply drag the first sphere over the mesh and drop. If you have the chequered cube selected, you’ll notice the color of the mesh change from the generic color to the color of the texture- in my case as the screenshot shows, the mesh goes from grey to brown.
This is the easy part. Now comes a bit of imagination and a bit of common sense into play- you cant apply the windows texture to the engine section and vice versa (the common sence bit) and you cant have just the same panel texture all over, you need trimmings for the textures (the imagination bit).
Texturing is mostly done in the perspective viewport, so you can just maximize this viewport by pressing the button in the bottom right corner of the screen that looks like a small box expanding into a big box with an arrow to signify size change.
After you applied the generic texture, you want to apply the details/other textures to the mesh, but you find a simple drag and drop just replaces the original texture. To prevent this, you will now need to pay a bit of attention to detail and concentrate.
In order to apply more than one textures, you need to do this:
You need to click the “polygon mode” icon (red square) on the right hand menu, click the “select object icon (mouse cursor) and then select the faces in the viewport to which you’d like to apply the new texture to. Once you select all your faces you wish to apply the new texture to, you simply select the new sphere from the material editor window, and then drag and drop it onto the selected faces:
You will find that you will need to repeat this step in order to apply the different textures to the different faces around the mesh. Repeat the step as necessary to assign different textures to the different faces. If you wish to stop selecting any faces, just deselect the red square for polygon mode.
For the sake of a blatant different and to show how to texture, i will be applying the engine (green) texture to the faces surrounding the faces i applied the windows textures to. You will normally apply a trimming style texture to such areas to ‘beautify it further’ and make sure it fits.
Double check all your steps first. Have you done everything correct up to the last paragraph? Are you sure? Are you REALLY- sure? Excellent. Lets carry on.
Mapping textures comes AFTER you finish applying all the textures to your mesh as you want to. In order to map textures on a mesh, you need to first open the unwrap UVW modifier from the modifier list on the right hand menu. Scroll down in the dropdown list till you see the option, then select it as shown below:
REMEMBER TO EXIT POLYGON MODE OR ANY OTHER MODE BY RE-SELECTING THE APROPRIATE ICON BEFORE YOU OPEN THE MODIFIER OR TEXTURING WILL NOT WORK AS REQUIRED.
Notice when you open the unwrap UVW modifier, you can see the textures applied to the mesh, but they seem to be stretched/distorted etc? This is because the textures are only APPLIED, not MAPPED. We need to do the mapping for each face, and this is what the UVW modifier allows us to do.
Once youre in face mode, begin to select the first face(s) you wish to work on/map textures for. I decide that i want to map the green textures surrounding the windows [i classed them as trims for the sake of explaining, but theyre obviously not, you need to assign proper trimming textures]
Hitting the quick planar map button after selecting your faces and selecting the averaged normals option will automatically map the texture for you without any distortions/stretched faces etc, HOWEVER, it does not necessarily mean it mapped it in the correct rotation as you want it, or the size you want it to ideally be. It only maps the faces to the size it should be, nothing more, nothing else, but is an extremely useful tool nonetheless. Youll use it often. Sometimes the texture may not map properly with the averaged normals option, just experiment with the x, y or z axes then till it works.
To ensure that the texture rotation is to the standard you want, and is the size you want, you need to hit the edit button, which opens a new window displaying the texture, and the faces selected on it.
The triangle button next to the dropdown, when selected, will only display the selected faces from the viewport in the window. Very useful if the window gets rather cluttered/messy (which it may at a later stage). The 4 buttons at the top left corner of the window are for moving, rotating, scaling, and freeform mode. Youll mostly be working in freeform mode, but you may from time to time need to use the other modes as well. For example, in this situation, i need to rotate the selected faces map co ords, so i select the rotate icon, and rotate the faces by clicking, holding and dragging around in a circle till i have the faces lying in a desirable direction. In freeform mode, i select one of the corners, hold down control, and drag the corner outward to increase the size. Holding down control means the size increase will remain in the same shape as before, no distortions.
As you can see, the selected faces now have correctly mapped textures, which means youre ready to move onto the rest of the models. From here on its basically a repetition of this step again and again until youve mapped the textures on every face of the mesh.
Once youre finished texturing, you need to complete the final few steps before you can export the model to create the CMP/inclusion into the mod.
To complete the mesh, you need to use of the symmetry modifier. Making sure your unwrap UVW modifier is now deselected (the yellow highlight should be grey), go to the modifiers list, find the symmetry modifier, and open it. Select the axis which will correctly complete the mesh, and mirror the mapped texture co-ordinates as well.
Having done that, right click on either modifier, and click the option collapse all to make the changes permanent, save copy as to ensure youre work is saved.
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