STEP 1: I will talk about modelling etc in another tutorial. This one is explaining skinning a simple building, the same principles could be used on anything you make. This was the first time I tried this method and it turned out OK so I will refine it over time I suppose. OK, build your model and REGROUP it into useful groups. eg. front wall, back wall, roof, sides, sign and step. to group something, select all the faces you want in a group using SHIFT-LEFT CLICK to add to your selection and SHIFT RIGHT CLICK to minus from your selection of faces, then click regroup, rename it to something appropriate.



STEP 2: Now hide everything, then unhide each group one at a time, each time pressing PRINT SCREEN to screen grab it from the appropriate view, I then cropped each view and composited them all onto a 1024x1024 blank image in PS, laying them out as best I could and save it as shop.bmp or something. I have added the names so its easy for you to see how I did it. This will be resized down later, it just allows us to add more detail.



STEP 3: Now create a new Material and choose your map from the dialog, shop.bmp we created earlier and assign it to all the groups. Now select one group at a time and open the "Texture Coordinate Editor" and align each group over map. As shown, I have scaled and aligned the front of the mesh over the front part in the texture map. Choose your group from the pulldown, choose the viewpoint from the pulldown below, then remap, now use scale and move to position each group. Once you have aligned them all you should see something like the image below.



STEP 4: As you can see the shop.bmp is mapped all over the model and the texture matches what the mesh looks like underneath (more or less) heh heh, now it is simply a case of actually painting the shop.bmp to suit the model. Want a different building?? paint a new skin using the shop.bmp as a template then load that map up as the texture.



STEP 5: You can see the shop.bmp loaded into the texture slot, this is then assigned to all your groups which are using your texture coordinates that you set when you aligned each group over the template. You MUST click new in the material dialog before you can load in your bitmap. Also it helps to rename it, but I forgot this time, heh heh very naughty!!!



STEP 6: A bit more progress. I like to paint over the template on layers above the template in my paint package so I can hide em and check alignment and stuff. Also if you make changes to the shop.bmp or whatever your skin is called :) you must reload the shop.bmp in milkshape before it refreshes and sometimes you have to click on the model as well. This is useful for checking your progress.



STEP 7: This is the completed skin. Its easy enough to see where everything is and you can paint other skins and map em onto the same model for variations.


STEP 8: Heres a couple of examples. I hope you found this tutorial useful, If you did drop by the forums or email me so I know if its worth me writing any more.....