My First Decent Model

#1 Actually, the front side of the blade is pointed to the left, and you would hold the front side of the blade away from you as you slash downward or sideways. When it is sized porpotionally to a character, you'll see that it really isn't a dagger.

That does look pretty good, but before I make any changes, I would like to see it on a character.

I'm going to do a quick export today to see if things look ok, and to see how the multires feature works.

Thanks for the suggestion! I think I may try it as just a variation of the sword!

-Griff

#2 Lookin good! The only thing I have a suggestion about is how to better set up the UV map. The space could be used more efficiently if the texture was a rectangle rather than a square. Remember that any image will display correctly as long as its sides are powers of 2... they don't actually have to be square images. Right now, most of your space on the UV is being used to texture the handle, which is kind of silly considering the handle is going to be in the characters hand for most of the time and, thus, not be seen.

The only downside to have rectangle textures is that you have to mess with your workflow a little bit, since 3dsmax only lets you unwrap the UVs to a square (to the best of my knowledge). What I would do is take the exported UV coordinants and open them in Photoshop. Then start a new file thats either 256x128 ( you could probably even go a little longer... 320 wide or so). then select the different parts of your map in the exported UV image and drag them into different layers in your rectangle image. Resize so that the thing that is going to be seen most often has slightly more area than the rest. Paint your texture. When you are done, apply it to the mesh in max and then resize the UV coordinants to fit the texture.

Also, check out this tutorial. It covers how to make a fairly good metal from scratch.

Feel free to reply with any questions... hope this helps. :)

#3 I agree that the handle takes up a lot of space, but I'm pleased with the results.

Making my texture maps rectangular just sounds like a headache to me. I do think that I want to redo the blade though. Maybe I'll re uv map the model to allow more space for the blade itself.

I exported it the other day and put it on a character, and I must say that it looked nice. I added another level of detail and the model still looks great. Maybe if I find the time, I'll post a screenshot. The next thing I need to do is animate some sword attacks, and once I do that, I can post an action shot.

I would, however, like to know how to place more than one texture map on an object in max, and have that supported in Torque.

-Griff

(I really like the new layout!)

#4 Assigning more than one texture map to an object is discussed in the max documentation. Do a search for "Multiple UVs" or "Multiple Textures" or something like that.