CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P4: 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. | 68 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines Applying a Utility Material A utility material is a special material that helps you to accomplish a task but will not be part of the finished work. For unwrapping processes checkered materials work well sometimes these materials can take the form of different colored squares with numbers in the squares to help define relationships between the UVs and the model. To see a new material on the model go to the display panel and on the Display Color rollout turn on the Shaded Material Color. Select your model and then refer to Figure to create a checkered material. Try to get into the habit of naming your materials any name will do but leaving default material names invites problems later in the process because you can end up with mixed-up materials. Just as you created a custom material in Chapter 1 create a custom material here. If you go to the Maps rollout and click on the None button to the right of Diffuse color the Material Map Browser launches. Double-click on Checker and your screen should look like Figure . The number 1 in the figure indicates where the Checker map type is in the list 2 indicates what changes you should make to the tiling values for the checker pattern and 3 is a reminder that you can get back to the main material editor menu by clicking the Parent button. FIGURE Creating a utility material to test the quality of the UVW mapping. Chapter 3 Unwrapping Game Art 69 Figure demonstrates what the Material Editor looks like when you get back to the main menu. The numbers in the figure serve as reminders to Assign Material to Selection and Show Map in Viewport. These two steps are necessary to see the checkered material on the model. There is also a reminder in this screen shot to make sure your Display Color is set to Material Color rather than Object Color. FIGURE Assigning the material to the model and making sure it displays correctly. To see what was accomplished by properly mapping the .
