Tutorial: Building a 3D Spaceship Model with Wings3D

[GaryChildress]

One thing I seldom see on the Matrix forums is a tutorial on how to customize graphics for a game. I've often had to figure things out for myself the hard way because no one ever seems to show how to do things the easy way here. In an effort to encourage more graphics modding for Distant Worlds I present the following tutorial.

[center]Building a 3D Spaceship Model with Wings3D[/center]


This, I hope, will be part of a short series of tutorials which will ultimately culminate in a new ship graphic for Distant Worlds. This first tutorial will deal with making a very simple model using Wings3D which will then be used in later tutorials to make a 2D ship graphic for Distant Worlds.

So here goes...

Step 1: You will need to download and install Wings3D which can be found here: http://www.wings3d.com/

Wings3D is, IMO, probably the best freeware 3D graphics modeling program that I have ever encountered. It's easy to use and can make good quality 3D models, and can export them into a number of 3D formats for import into other programs. Basically I use Wings3D to create my models and then import them into another program such as Bryce or Poser to do the rendering of the model into a 2D image for use in certain games, including Distant Worlds. In this first tutorial I will simply demonstrate how to create a 3D model and then in a later tutorial we will export it to 3DS format and then import it into another program for rendering.

Below is the model which we will be making. Very simple but making it will demonstate a few of the features which can be used for making more complex models. From there you can knock yourself out experimenting and trying out other features of this robust 3D modeling program.

[GaryChildress]

Step 2: Humble Beginnings

Let's start off by making a simple cylinder in the middle of the screen. For the purposes of this tutorial the cylinder will be the only object we will create. Everything else will come out of it. In later installments I may touch on features such as "Combine" to combine two or more separate shapes in the screen, but for now we will just work with one simple geometric figure.

Simply right click anywhere on the Wings3D window and choose Cylinder from the context window that pops up.

[GaryChildress]

You will end up with a simple cylinder in the middle of your screen right at the intersection of the x, y and z axis.

[GaryChildress]

The next step is to get that cyliner facing horizontally across the x and z axis. You could simply do all your modeling with the cylinder facing in its default orientation but I'd like to introduce the rotate feature in this tutorial. So we're going to rotate the cylinder. The first step is to select "Body Selection Mode" by clicking the solid red wire frame cube up on the tool bar as indicated in this pic by the orange arrow. This will allow you to select the entire cylinder in a single click.

[GaryChildress]

Now click somewhere on the cylinder itself and the entire object will turn red. This means that you have selected the entire object. If you wanted to select a single face of the cylinder, then you would select the "Face Selection Mode" cube right next to the "Body Selection Mode" cube on the tool bar. In this case we are going to rotate the entire cylinder and not just a face of it. If we rotate a face it will distort our cylinder from what we want to start out with. So lets just select the whole cylinder.

[GaryChildress]

Now right click somewhere on the screen to bring up the context menu for Body Selection Mode. At the top of the menu you see "rotate" just below "move". We want to rotate the cylinder by 90 degrees in order to lay it on its side. So click on "rotate".

[GaryChildress]

We want to rotate it along the Z axis in order to lay it flat facing along the X axis. So choose "Z" from the menu that follows.

[GaryChildress]

Now it gets a little tricky. You need to move the mouse around the screen a little until you get the feel for it. You need to move the mouse until you see either 90 or -90 in the top left corner. Again, the orange arrow points to what I'm talking about. Once you fiddle around and get it to 90 exact, left click on the mouse and the cylinder will stop rotating. If you mess up just hit the "undo" arrow in the top left of the menu bar and try the process again until you get the object right at 90 degrees.

[GaryChildress]

Now we want to start messing around with individual faces on the cylinder. So let's go up to the "Face Selection Mode" button on the tool bar and select it. Now when you click on a face of the cylinder it will only highlight that face which you selected and not the entire cylinder.

[D.W.O.H]

See this is dangerous grounds for a guy like me cause I crave new ships so bad but I know if I tried that id prolly end up smashing my monitor out of plain frustration with being just ignorant to the whole graphics world

but ill mess with it just to confirm that yea I shouldnt bother,lol

[GaryChildress]

Now go up to the menu bar and under the menu item "Select" choose "Deselect". This will unselect all the faces which were selected when you moved the entire cylinder under "Body Selection Mode". As we work with a face in this tutorial we will need to deselect all the other faces so that we can alter just the faces of the polygon which we want to alter. Now the cylinder turns back to its default gray because no faces are selected anymore.

[GaryChildress]

Next, select the circular face in front of you by clicking on the face. This will turn the selected face red as shown below.

[GaryChildress]

Now, once the face is selected, once again right click somewhere on the screen to bring up the "Face Selection Mode" context menu. Choose "Extrude" from this menu to pull out a segment of the cylinder and lengthen it.

[GaryChildress]

From the menu which follows on screen, choose "Normal".

[GaryChildress]

Now move the mouse around the screen until you have extruded the face about this far (as pictured below). No need to get into precise numbers. Well just play around a little until we get something that looks roughly like what we want. Once you are satisfied with the length of the extrusion, simply left click on the screen and the extrusion feature is canceled. The extruded face will stay where you left off with it.

Next VERY IMPORTANT, go back up to the "Select" menu item and choose "Deselect" again. This will deselect the face we just extruded so that we can select a different face and work with it. If you don't "Deselect" faces you aren't working with, then whatever command you issue will take effect on ALL SELECTED FACES. We're just going to work with one face at a time for now. So we don't want to select more than one face for our commands.

[GaryChildress]

Now we're going to navigate around our object a little until we get to the back side. Hopefully you are doing this exercise with a wheeled mouse. If you click on the wheel and then move the mouse around you can rotate your view around your cylinder (which now has two sections to it). For the purposes of this exercise, you want to rotate to the opposite side from which you just extruded. Once you get to the view below, left click somewhere on the screen to stop rotating.

[GaryChildress]

Now repeat the last procedure until you get another extrusion, this time extruding out the other side. You should be left with a figure that looks like this below. You now have two etrusions, creating a 3 sectioned cylinder like the one below.

[GaryChildress]

Now, with the newly extruded face still selected, right click on the screen to bring up the context menu and choose "Scale uniform". As you scroll the mouse on the screen the circular face of the cylinder will now increase or decrease in size uniformly around the entire plane of the circular face. You want to decrease the size, creating a narrow point-like section to your cylinder. This will be the sleek front end of your space ship.

[GaryChildress]

Next, once again "Deselect" all faces. The next thing we are going to do is add an engine to the back of our space ship. Click on the mouse wheel again and scroll to the opposite side of your figure. Select the rear face of your ship, right click and select "Inset" from the context menu as shown below.

[GaryChildress]

Drag the mouse until you get something that looks like this below. Then once again choose the "Extrude" feature from the context menu.