CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P3: Iwish to thank the editing team at Charles River Media (Emi Smith, Karen Gill, Jennifer Blaney, and Jenifer Niles) for their help in getting this book publish-ready. Thanks, too, to my technical editor, Mike Duggan. Also deserving recognition are the guys who make the Torque Game Engine available, GarageGames, who directly or indirectly made this book and the accompanying CD possible. In particular, I want to thank Joe Maruschak at GarageGames for the great articles and forum answers that have helped me and many others get a handle on this engine. I. | 38 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines FIGURE Using axial scaling to reshape the end of the protrusion. If you want to snap to particular points the 3D snap tool is useful. Set your snaps by right-clicking the Snaps toggle. Select the check boxes you want to use and close the dialog by clicking the X in the corner. In Figure snaps are being set to Endpoint and Midpoint. FIGURE Snaps are being set to Endpoint and Midpoint for speed and accuracy. If the Snaps toggle is active your cursor should snap to whatever points you have it set to just get into the Cut feature and feel around with the mouse for the snap as shown in Figure . Make sure to turn the Snaps toggle off when you are finished because this tool can make normal work difficult if it is kept on. Chapter 2 Low Poly Modeling 39 FIGURE Using the 3D Snap tool to snap to midpoints of an edge. In Figure notice how the new edge created in the previous figure was terminated by connecting it to two separate vertices. This potential T-junction has been tied off so you should not have surprises when you convert this model to an Editable Mesh at the end of this process. FIGURE Cuts are completed with no T-junctions to be found. 40 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines After you have the basic edges in place it is easy to add volume and shape to the model by moving them out a bit as shown in Figure . This is most accurately done from an orthogonal view like front right left or top. FIGURE Moving the new edges to add volume to the protrusion. Before this model is ready for unwrapping it needs to be converted to an Editable Mesh. This significantly changes the look of the model because each triangle becomes more obvious. Triangles are not obvious on an Editable Mesh while selected you have to click on the 3ds Max background effectively deselecting the model to see the triangles. It is a good idea to use the Arc Rotate tool to inspect the model from all sides to check the assumptions that
