How to use Blender to make SWBF series models (FAQ)

[mswf]

By making the vertices in your UV layout go beyond the size of your texture. Make sure to try and extend towards the left and top, it may otherwise cause problems.

[lucasfart]

Ugh. I was hoping there was an easier way, but i guess i'll have to do it that way.....how i wish texturing was a simple as in sketchup...

[mswf]

You don't know what you're saying yet, texturing really isn't that easy and (I hope) you'll find, after some practise, that the control over the texture you get from making real UV layouts is worth the extra effort, in comparison to sketchup. (I'm speaking from experience)

[Jaspo]

Make sure to try and extend towards the left and top, it may otherwise cause problems.

So will doing this fix the texture glitches I sometimes get from the munge process? That would be cool. Very cool.

Oh, and by the way, that house a few posts back could definitely benefit from a lot of alt+m, there's no need for that many verticies, unless each of those squares needs a different color of siding or something. Also does it have interior geometry? if not there is a script (I think in the edit menu) for adding it. You'll need to select everything before doing it though.

[lucasfart]

You don't know what you're saying yet, texturing really isn't that easy and (I hope) you'll find, after some practise, that the control over the texture you get from making real UV layouts is worth the extra effort, in comparison to sketchup. (I'm speaking from experience)

Did you mean hard when you said easy? I know how to make UV's and setup textures, its just that i have a large model with a tonne of faces that need a tiled texture in one direction, all the same size. Its gonna take me a long time and i was wondering if there was any way to speed it up...

[Maveritchell]

Did you mean hard when you said easy? I know how to make UV's and setup textures, its just that i have a large model with a tonne of faces that need a tiled texture in one direction, all the same size. Its gonna take me a long time and i was wondering if there was any way to speed it up...

Texturing and UVing a simple model (which is all any of us do here) is almost always going to take up at least 50% of the work. You can get more efficient with your texturing the more you do it, but there aren't any real shortcuts to getting something done well.

[mswf]

Indeed. But, try to experiment with the different options that are being presented when you press the unwrap shortcut-key, some of them can, with a little extra work, save a lot of time when texturing big rock faces etc.

[Jaspo]

I created a tutorial video which is available on swbffiles (filefront). The link is edited into the first post of this topic.

[Ace_Azzameen_5]

I think your video lacks video. (Using VLC/ WMP in Win 7 x64)

[Wonderboy]

Ok well I am wondering on this one. I meant to say in my question is how to get a single face have more than 4 vertices. One the side view of this model, made by lucasfart, the face has about 7 or 8 vertices. When I make something like that I usually have to connect the vertices.

Hidden/Spoiler:

[lucasfart]

All you have to do is select the existing 4 edged faces and press "f" select "make f-gon" and they'll be joined. They'll still be seperate faces but you can't see the lines between them.

Just so you know as well, you can't have faces with more then 4 vertices, so don't bother trying .

[mswf]

f-gons are not really doing anything and you shouldn't worry about wanting to achieve that effect visually inside Blender. But, you can still get the desired for ingame by selecting all the planes you want to flatten, setting editing oriantaton to normal, switch to the scaling tool and scale the normal z axis to 0.

[lucasfart]

I'm not getting you, mswf. How do you select a plane and change the editing orientation to normal? And what diefference does it make from an f-gon?

[Surma]

Select a plane - Just face selection, go to edit mode and go to face selection mode
Editing orientation - No clue, search the blender wikibook
What he essentially wants you to do is flatten the faces you want to make into an f-gon, so that they dont bend. That way it will be completely flat and look like an f-gon. When a texture is then applied the edge between the faces will be invivsible (a lot of edges get smoothed and some details dissapear when you have a texture. I recently had a 5k model in another game that i cut down to 1k and it barely looked different with the textures).

[Jaspo]

I think your video lacks video. (Using VLC/ WMP in Win 7 x64)

Eh, hopefully not because I used the camstudio codec to create it. If that's the problem, just download camstudio...its a tiny little (free) application that is used to video capture whats on your screen, and I guess it comes with that codec.

Edit: I released a new version of the video; the link is updated.

[Philou231]

Hi, first I want to thanks every people helping for this tutorial and giving tips and I want to say a special thanks to Jaspo for his video and all his time and help! But my problem is still causing me trouble. The textures does not appear even if I follow exactly the video. But I found something, if I am opening one of my assets objects from SWBF in .msh I can see the textures BUT if I am exporting it with the SWViewer in .wrl and I am opening this new .wrl file then there are no textures anymore, even if the .wrl is in the folder of the texture and in the folder of the msh. Can the problem be because of my SWViewer or maybe from blender(I tried reinstalling it but nothing new). Something else: when I open the files in .wrl there is always a place where the textures are wrote.Hope this will help someone to help me

Thanks you
Philou231

P.S. If somebody have a link to a .wrl they made that work on there computer I would appreciate to look at this and see if I can solve my problem alone.
P.S.S. I saw in my .wrl files, opening them with notepad, # Exported using VRML97 exporter v1.55 (2006/01/17) maybe it is too old?

[lucasfart]

Just found a whole stack of good tuts for blender on the Blender Underground website. One of the top links there is to 555 Blender tuts, which also looks really good if you have issues with anything in Blender. You might recognize some of them, but i doubt anybody here has seen them all.

[Philou231]

Thanks for this help I'll look at those tutorials if I find something good.
BTW if somebody have something else(more precise...why not? ) I'll take care to look at every helping posts.

Thanks You

[Wonderboy]

I, too, have this same problem. I have selected TexFace and have my texture in the same folder as my model. I have no idea about this, and searching through blender tutorials won't help much when we can't see the model's texture in SWBF Viewer. So yes, as Philou said, please give a specific answer, not just a link to tutorials, though they may be useful for the modeling aspect.

[lucasfart]

Sorry. Those links weren't specifically for you, more just a random link i found . It sounds like the texture isn;t getting exported with the model. Does the .wrl have a .png in the same folder as it? Because when you export to .wrl i think it makes a .png texture. If not, open your .tga texture and save it as a .png with the same name as the .tga.

EDIT: Ok, now i have a question.

I've made my model, textured it, and got it ingame. My only problem is some of the doorways and windows are blocked by invisible non-existent faces. I remember reading a post about it somewhere before and think i need a .option file for it, but i can't remember exactly what i need to do.