CREATING GAME ART FOR 3D ENGINES- P9: 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. | 218 Creating Game Art for 3D Engines has a wide range of tools for creating textures in the actual mesh. The two images shown in Figure started as planes. The steel texture on the right was created by setting the plane segments to 20 X 20. Some of the polygons were beveled and a MeshSmooth modifier was applied. The reptile texture on the left was converted to an Editable Poly and subdivided with the Cut tool. Some of the sections were beveled and Edge Tesselation was applied. The entire model had the MeshSmooth modifier applied to it. To take this idea further you can unwrap the model to a UV template paint the template and apply the result to the model again. This is how the reptile texture was created. First the model was unwrapped using the Unwrap UVWs modifier. The UVs were used to create a template which was then imported to Photoshop and painted with darker green paint in the lower faces and lighter green paint in the more elevated faces. This texture was then reapplied to the model in 3ds Max. At this point you can create another rendering of the model in its textured state for the final texture bitmap. FIGURE You can model textures in 3ds Max and then render them as a texture file. Chapter 9 Character Texturing 219 TROUBLESHOOTING After a texture is on a model problems with the unwrap can become more apparent. Misaligned Unwrap modifiers can be disorienting to deal with and distorted textures can ruin a model s believability. Misaligned Unwrap If you have an Unwrap UVW modifier that has become misaligned meaning that the seams for the UVs appear to have become offset from the actual model location unfreeze and unhide everything and make sure all the modifiers are on in the modifier stack. Distorted Textures If you are going to use rivets or some other round design in your texture be careful about using the Normal map to unwrap the model. If the model is not flat to the front or back view or whichever view you use you can get texture distortion which
