My Textures

Now once all the elements are where you want them to be we can now texture it! To do this we have to enable us to use it in Photoshop, to do this we need to render and image of it by selecting ‘Tools’ then ‘Render UVW Template’. Then save it as a TGA image with the values below.



The Textures

The Art of Unwrapping

When it came to texturing I had a few problems – I didn’t know how the unwrap UV thing worked and when it did I had a few faces on my model that had have polys – this was bad as Unreal would have a fit and not except the model. So I had to unwrap the UV change the faces and then redo the UV, this was done about 3 times and was highly annoying and took a considerable amount of my time (grrr).

Once Unwrap UVW has been selected, the Face should be selected and on the Viewport all of the object that’s needs texturing should be selected. BUT BE AWARE!!! Ignore Backfacing should be not be selected.

The object can be selected by dragging the mouse over the whole object or simply pressing Ctrl+A. Notice now that the object(s) have turned red.
Now select Edit on the tab on the right – this will bring up a new screen.

On the new screen is a map of all the objects selected but broken down by max into elements – looks a bit of a mess but selecting Flatten Mapping and entering numbers around Choose an 75 and 0.25 in the boxes will clean up the Map and also spread them out which will make then much easier to texture.

To move an individual element to a certain area the ‘Select Element’ should be selected, that way the whole Element is moved and not just a little bit.

Now once all the elements are where you want them to be we can now texture it! To do this we have to enable us to use it in Photoshop.

My initial idea was to make some sort of weapon that can be used in Unreal – but everyone else was talking about it so I thought id create something at random, so the first thing that popped into my head was a totem pole. RANDOMNESS!!!

Im starting the model from a spline then lathing it to the shape that I want, once this has done I will detail it by changing it to an editable poly moving around vertex points.
I placed a picture of the totem pole behind my model so I can use it as a template as I worked on it.