Tutorial on making weapons?

[rudel_ic]

Also, after you generate a UV map, feel free to mark the vertices of that UV map and move them around to get them all into the center grid. B for marquee, G for translation, R for rotation and so forth, that's totally true in the UV/Image editor as well.

[Lotus Wolf]

well i've looked into it a bit and found that only "unwrap" "unwrap (smart projection)" and "lightmap UV pack" work as UV mapping techniques, all the others screw lugaru or X2Solid/Brainfart up. anyway, i'll try to do more digging and see what we have to stay away from to avoid this problem. for now, using the "lightmap UV pack" option is a good fix for broken weapons, but will be a little more tedious to make a good textures for, but for objects (like my pillar) it makes their texture kind of rough. since objects use mostly the same textures, you can't make new ones for each and every object.
anyway, i think i've used up my rambling tolerance for today so i'll shut up now and tell you what i get from the digging later.

[rudel_ic]

Well, you can work around the fact that one texture is re-used. You just model everything using that texture so that it only uses a fraction of the texture.

So if the hypothetical texture tex1.png is used by the hypothetical objects obj1.solid, obj2.solid, obj3.solid and obj4.solid, you distribute the UV coordinates as follows:

Code: Select all

##############################
#.............#..............#
#.............#..............#
#...OBJ1......#....OBJ2......#
#....UVs......#.....UVs......#
#.............#..............#
##############################
#.............#..............#
#.............#..............#
#...OBJ3......#....OBJ4......#
#....UVs......#.....UVs......#
#.............#..............#
##############################

Edit: The issue with that trick is that if immobiles get scaled, their UV coordinates aren't scaled, so if you had a car with 2 smileys on the hood at scale 1, you'd have a car with 4 smileys on the hood at scale 2. So this only works for 1:1 models that are never ever scaled.
1:1 scale value in Lugaru is 0.6666666 by the way.

[gameman581]

I just started working on a weapon, my first time in blender. is there a way to put something at 0,0,0?

and also, how do you convert faces to triangles?

sorry, I'm new to this, I'm just now shaping a weapon...

[Stromboli]

Ctrl + T in edit mode to convert to triangles, I believe. If not you can just hit space, find edit, faces, and convert to triangles otherwise. I think.

[rudel_ic]

I just started working on a weapon, my first time in blender. is there a way to put something at 0,0,0?

Press N (opens Transform Properties)

Object mode:
Select Object
LocX to 0, LocY to 0, LocZ to 0 in Transform Properties

Edit Mode:
Vertices:
Select a vertex
Vertex X to 0, Vertex Y to 0, Vertex Z to 0 in Transform Properties
Edges:
Select an edge in Edge Select Mode
Median X to 0, Median Y to 0, Median Z to 0 in Transform Properties
Faces:
Select a face in Face Select Mode
Median X to 0, Median Y to 0, Median Z to 0 in Transform Properties

In Edit Mode, the Global/Local Selection Thingie means whether or not the values in the Transform Properties are relative to the center of the object (the pink dot). Local means the values _are_ relative.
So you will only see a difference there if the object's center isn't at 0,0,0

[gameman581]

thanks a lot to both of you guys!

[rudel_ic]

I'll point to my video tutorial in here once again because it simply makes sense.

Here it is:
http://www.zshare.net/video/54394704221c262f/ (Download it, it's a high resolution video)

And you should really read this post: viewtopic.php?p=68751#p68751

In short, get rid of x2solid and jump onto the Brainfart bandwagon. It's easier to use and produces better results.