REFINEMENTS

...well it's about time we had some refinements around here.

SMOOTHING GROUPS

At the moment your man here still looks very square. There are a couple of things we can do to relieve that. Firstly you can smooth the whole mesh in the viewport. You do this by activating the Sub-Object button and selecting 'Face'




Now drag a selection box around the whole model, selecting all of the faces on the model.



Now on the right-hand side, slide the face sub-object rollout right up so that you can see the smoothing groups buttons:




Raise the threshold as high as it will go. And click 'Auto Smooth'
Now if you right-click the viewport title and deactivate 'Edged faces' by clicking on it, you will see your model nicely rounded off. like so:




This is actually just an illusion, your model isn't really smoother or more detailed, it's just a lighting trick that blends shadowing across face edges so that they aren't visible. Edges are still visible on extreme angles and on the sides of the model. However the effect is used in the game.
Now it's possible to smooth individual sections of the model creating smoothed areas and sharp edges in the game. This is particualrly useful for creating the edges of thick garments like flack-jackets etc. I personally can't really notice the effect in the game, the skin tends to do all the work of creating edges, so I usually just smooth the whole model. However if you want to smooth sections, here's how you do it:
Select the whole model in the 'Face' sub-object. Now click the 'Clear All' button and your model should become quite angular. Now select an area on the model that you want as a smoothed group. Now click the button labelled '1'.



That portion of your model is now smoothing group 1. Now select the next group and click the button labelled '2', and so on and so on....
Notice that where smoothing groups meet there is a hard edge like a crease.

VERTEX TWEAKING

Another way of making your model look a little less square is to 'tweak' the vertexes. That is to simply use the move tool to shift vertexes about to make the model less angular.
There's no right and wrong about this one. You simply use your own judgement. Here's a before and after shot of our bloke with his vertexes 'tweaked'.


Before: Our bloke is very angular and regular, like a robot.


After: Our bloke's arm has been tweaked and it's a little more organic and chaotic looking. There are less regularities in it. I generally do this with all my models but whilst you make the layout of the vertexes in the model erratic, try to keep limbs symmetrical. A good idea might be to tweak one limb and when you are happy with it, copy and mirror it and replace the existing one with it, so that both legs are still symmetrical despite having somewhat random vertex placement. The example above is somewhat exaggerated and a little messy looking but more complex areas with more vertexes and more subtle vertex 'tweaking' can look quite effective.

ADDING DETAILS

Okay so You've done all that but he still looks like a B-Movie robot. Well, if you've followed this tutorial exactly then your model will have 292 faces. Given that Half-Life running on a good PC system will handle around 700 faces per model, you have a lot of lee-way to add faces to your model.

This is done in several ways. Either by extruding faces and dividing edges which I covered in the basic mesh-editing tutorial, or you can also build faces from scratch like this:
With your model selected, activate the sub-object button and select vertex. Now slide the right-hand side rollout up till you see the 'Create' button and click it.



Now use the crosshairs to place three vertexes on the screen. Anywhere you like:




Now change to the 'Face' Sub-object and your vertexes will disappear.
Slide the rollout up until you reach 'Build Face' and click it. Your vertexes will appear again.




Now click on one of the vertexes and release the mouse button. Move to either one of the other vertexes. You will see a line drag behind the pointer from the first. Click on the second vertex and the line will become solid. Now click on the third vertex and one of two things will happen. Either you'll see a face (provided your viewport is in 'Smooth and Highlights' mode):



Or you will see an outline. If you see an outline it means that the face has been drawn facing away from you:




Depending on wether you drew the face clock-wise or anti-clockwise will determine wether the face is facing you or not. This is true when you are building faces on the model also. It also depends on wether your model has been mirrored or attached to a mirrored model as to wether you need to make the face clockwise or anti-clockwise. The best thing to do is try it and see. If it's wrong, then undo it and try the opposite way.
Obviously it isn't much use all the way over there away from our model, but faces can be built in this way onto any three vertexes. Enabling you to delete sections of your model and re-build them by hand. I built the entire hind quarters of my Quake2 Centaur model in this way.

Personally, I suggest, as we have a basic humanoid shape that the best way of adding faces is to simply divide the existing edges. This will give you vertexes centred on faces enabling you to pull them out and make the surface less angular like the leg for example:
If I divide all the diagonal edges in the leg, I get a slew of centred vertexes like this:




You can see the diagonal edges in the faces here. MAX doesn't always draw them, so it might be necessary to drag a selection box around them to highlight them. Then in the 'Edge' Sub-object click the 'Divide' button...



...and then click on the individual edges that you want to divide.




See now how instead of a diagonal edge in each face, there is, instead a cross of four edges. This cross will have a vertex in the centre of it. So when you have divided all the edges that you want, you can then change to the 'Vertex' sub-object and select the new vertexes and 'tweak' them as we did above.

SEPERATING ELEMENTS

Animation can wreak havoc with your model especially at the joints, causing pinching. The shoulders are the worst for it. Quake2 player models have seperate legs and arms. The Half-Life Gordon model has seperate arms. That is to say that they are all one model, but within the mesh, the arm isn't attached to the torso. This means that when they rotate and raise, the vertexes at the shoulder don't 'pinch'.
'Pinching' is when two vertexes assigned to a bone, orbit the bone as it rotates and draw together, creating an impossibly thin connection at the joint. With a bit of work, and careful skeleton placement it is possible to keep your model-mesh one single piece and minimise the 'pinching'. However, for beginners, the seperate legs and arms are a good option. I generally find that legs aren't too bad for pinching, but Half-Life models do tend to suffer from what I call 'Collapsing Arse Syndrome'. Because of the nature of rigid vertex assignment to the skeleton, when Half-Life models crouch, their backside tends to collapse up inside the body. It's not terribly noticeable but bad nevertheless.
Okay, this is all well and good, but I've just showed you how to make a humanoid with the arms and legs attached. D'OH! Well, don't dispair. It is possible to detach them.
Here we go.
Select your mesh and then go to the 'face' sub-object



and select the arms like so:




and then slide the 'face' sub-object rollout down until you find the 'Detach' button.
click it and the arms become a seperate object.
Shut off the sub-object and select the arms. Now reactivate the sub-object and select 'face'. Now select all of the faces in one of the arms and delete them so that you are only left with one arm. Now shut off the sub-object again.




Now using the move tool and the movement restrictions set to 'X' move the arm away from the body.




Now we need to work on the arm and the body could get in the way, so we'll hide it. Select the body and then go to the 'Display' tab:




And click the 'hide selected button at the bottom. The body will disappear. It has not been deleted, it is simply hidden at the moment.
Now the arm. Build a face over the open end as I explained further up.




Then divide the new edge at the end of the arm and switching to 'Vertex' sub-object pull the vertex out to make a point.




Now shut off the sub-object and go to the display tab again. Click 'Unhide All' and the body will appear again. Now repeat what you just did on the arms, on the holes in the shoulders, like so:




Now shut off the sub-object and select the arm. Mirror the arm along the 'X' axis, so that there are two of them, and using the move tool and the movement restriction set to 'X', move them into position next to the model, like so:




When you are happy with the position of the arms, select the body and in the modifier rollout, make sure the sub-object is off. Click the 'Attach' button and then select each of the arms in turn. The whole model should be one mesh again but with seperate arms.

FACE COUNT

If you want to keep an eye on how many triangles your model contains, then there is a handy little device in MAX that will allow you to do so. If you go to the utilities tab:




and click the 'More' button a list will appear. Select 'Polygon Counter' from it and this window will appear:




The top bar will tell you the total faces on the object that is selected. The bottom bar will tell you the total faces in the scene.

PRACTICING

...or 'Wax on! Wax off!'

Tutorial created by Scarecrow, THANK YOU !!!

© http://www.Planetfortress.com/TF2Models

TF2 is trademark of Valve Software and of Sierra Online.
© 2000 TF2 MODELS - Hosted by Planetfortress
Web designer/Webmaster : IXNAY