Hi folks

I worked on skinning a model all last week. After too much trial and error, I'd like to verify some things I think I observed.

Imagine we've got a cube in MED. The top, front, right side and 3d view are visible in the 4 windows.

I want to skin all 6 sides with different skins.

First question, what's the difference between creating a 2-sided mapping vs a 6-sided mapping?

Skinning the faces showing the the top, front or side view is easy. Select only the triangles on that face, pick "Create 6-sided mapping", pick Front (or Top or Right as appropriate), pick "Skin Editor" and you'll be taken to a screen with 2 windows. In one window you can see the triangles making up that face superimposed on whatever texture/pattern you picked previously; the other window contains a 3d view of the entire model.

Let's pretend I picked the front face and hit "Create 6-sided mapping". I think what happens is, MED shaves off the front face of my cube and allows me to assign different textures/colors to the top/bottom/front/back/left/right sides of the front face. I indicate top/bottom/front/back/left/right side when I pick Front, Back etc etc on the window that pops up when I hit Create 6-sided mapping.

Is that what's going on? Do I understand this correctly?

It seems, depending on the texture, that some color from the texture will "leak" onto other faces? Is that possible? How can I prevent that?

When I assign a texture to the left or right side, it seems distorted. How can I correct that?

Mark

I've been looking at that url all weekend. Its been very useful. Without it, I couldn't skin my model at all. However, it generated my questions.

Mark

Hi,
I'll try and answer a few of your questions.

The difference between 2- and 6-sided mapping is this:

2-sided mapping tries to map the whole model. You can't select a certain part of the model, only the whole thing. In an attempt to cover all sides it will create either a - front and back map - or a - left and right map - or a - top and bottom map -

6-sided mapping allows you to map individual parts of the model. This is what is useful in most situations 'cos it allows you to avoid the really bad stretching on the sides of models that you get when using 2-sided mapping.

As to what mapping does:

I am not quite sure what you mean with your description but as far as I know mapping has to do with creating a 2d map of your 3d model. With 6-sided mapping you're deciding from what direction you want to view a certain part of the model to get an optimal view of that section.

To stop the leaking of colours you should make sure that there is always a little border around the area you mapped in the colour of the part you are mapping. So if you want to colour one of the squares white you should leave a few pixel wide border of white around the square.

To make sure your skin isn't distorted you have to make sure that if something is a square the map you have created is also square. Make sure the proportions are correct.

Hope this helps.