Milkshape3D Tutorial 1.2

1.2 - Attaching skin to the model:

I hope you got a model on your Milkshape-screen now, that looks like this one:

Now we'll attach skin and clothes. First we have to create some groups of faces to seperate the modell into areas that'll get different textures. For that we start marking the left arm and switch to 'Group'-register where we see one entry, the smoothgroup from before:

Now we click 'Regroup' to assign the selected arm to a new group that we rename by using 'Rename' and the backspace-key to 'leftarm'. Again click Rename to let appear our new group inside the selection above. To ease the further work we activate the 'Hide'-button to say goodbye to our arm. That way we create the groups armright, legleft, legright, head (without face), face (the part that we extruded +5Z), hip (small part above the legs) and chest (thre rest):

To make the other parts visible again we choose 'Unhide' from 'Edit'-menu.

Now it's time to think about the look of the single groups. We wish to attach the skin (skinmeshing). Take these textures for the first time, that we attach to Blockhead together (do not download these pics but click 'em with pressed shift-key to get a ready-to-use *.bmp).


chest	tanga

hair	face

These simple textures are only to practice, with a little fantasy you can create much more cool skins. First we choose the group 'chest' and make sure that nothing else is selected. Click 'Select' inside the 'Group'-register. The chest should be marked. Now go to 'Material'-register:

There we first click 'New', then 'None', and browse to the file 'chest.bmp' that you just should have downloaded here. Now 'Rename' and enter 'chest', 'Rename' again and then 'Assign' to finally attach the skin. Now we'll adjust it inside the 'Textur Coordinate Editor' to move the texture for the chest (that we amateurishly take for the back too) to the proper position (choose it from 'Window'-menu):

Be careful with that tool (no heavy clicking, it looses its relation to the object then). First we choose the group that we wish to texture, 'chest', inside the top selection field. The texture that is assigned to this group should appear inside the larger area, 'chest'. Now we set the area, in which the chest should be painted by selecting 'Region' and dragging a frame onto the texture.
Then click 'Remap' and the grid of our chest should appear onto the texture. Now we can do the needed fine-tuning by f.e. 'Move'ing the grid to the proper position. Sometimes it could be useful to change the direction inside the second selection-field, all directions are available. Comfortably attach the chest-texture to the arms and legs too, try to rotate the arms to texture them horizontally. The 'head' gets 'hair'-texture and the face 'face'. Blockhead gets pants too, a jute-tanga with the tanga-texture. All groups must be assigned one after another. My Blockhead now looks like this:

I know, not very pretty or overwhelming, but not bad for the beginning. By using more faces, groups and textures the possibilities are nearly endless. If you tried to save your model as *.act-file, you will have been disappointed by this message: "Found vertex with invalid bone!". That means our humanoid still is as soft as a snail, he's in need of a skeleton. How to do this is described in the next chapter.