Lesson 3: Creating your first Weapon

Making faces

Now its about time to make the vertrices do their job. Lets start with the rear gun section. Making faces is easy, you select 3 or 4 vertrices and hit F6 to make a face. If you have read some basic o2 tutorials, you`ll know that every face has a "face normal" or a "direction". That means that a face is normaly only viewable from one side, the direction of the face normals (little blue lines poking out from each vertex). I assume you already know a little about this (if not, find a o2 interface tutorial or any 3d tutorial that deals with polygon modelling).

You should also heard that o2 supports faces created with 4 vertrices and not just 3 as in big-shot programs like 3dsmax. That way we can use less faces than normaly and still use 3-vertex faces when needed. We will select 4 or 3 vertrices and create faces on them using F6. Be careful to not overlap faces, that can make your model flicky and look bad ingame.

I`ll show you how to make your first face:

Zoom in on the rear gun section. We`ll start with a 4-vertex face.
Select the 4 vertrices as indicated on picture below:
Hit F6 and a face should be created.

Now we must make sure that the face is "facing" the right way. When I did this, my face direction was going from me in front view, not towards me as I wanted. So I had to reverse the face direction to make it the right way. Remember the trick I talked about in lesson 1, to see if the face is facing you? Go With the face selected, go to menu "View->Fill solid faces". Now, if the face is filled red, you know that it is facing towards you, but it if seem do disapear (it will go black and be hard to spot due to our black texture), it is facing the wrong way. To reverse the face direction, hit "W" key. Remember to make all faces face the same way during the rest of the page.

Now we have our first face. Note that we need to use a 3-vertex face just below our first one, since there are only 3 vertexes in that area. Select them using F4 (vertex select mode) and hit f6 again. Now o2 is pretty smart and it should face in the same direction as the last one, but check it out with the "Fill Solid faces trick" anyway.

Now , work your way around the rear part and create faces between the vertrices. Use 4-vertex faces where you can and 3-vertrex-faces where you have to. Make sure all is facing the right way and that noone overlaps eachother. You can delete a face without deleting the vertrices. Just select the face (F4 and all vertrices in the face) and delete it by hiting "D"-key.

Here is how it could look like when done:

Another great way to ensure all faces are in the desired direction is using the 3d view with "Face Culling" turned on (View->Face Culling or "F" key). When face culling is on only the faces that are pointing in the camera direction are drawn.

3d view with selected faces with face culling on. Since all faces are shown, they are facing the right way.

Let me show you why this feature is so great for searching out wrong-pointing faced. I will now select one of the faces and reverse it. Se what happened in the 3d view:

3d view with selected faces with face culling on. There is now a hole it our structure, which means one of the faces are the wrong way.

3d view with selected faces with face culling on. If we now move the camera and have a look at the back, we find our AWOL face again. As you can see, this is a much better and faster way to find bad faces compared to the "Fill Solid face"-trick I told you about earlier.

Now if you have understod the above, applying faces to the rest of the model should be easy. Just be careful, take it slow to make sure all faces are the right way and that noone overlaps eachother. Here is some pics of how it should look like:

Lets move on, shall we

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