8) A Quick Knife Tutorial

Making the Model
Open up Milkshape. If this is your first time useing milkshape, your out of luck because I'm not going to tell you what everything is and does. Go read another tutorial and come back later.

Now make sure that your viewport captions are showing. if they're not then go to the Window menu and turn them on. Since this model is going to be for quake 3 I'm going to assume you have a 3d card. Make sure that "Redraw All Viewports" is checked in the model tab of the control panel. Having this checked allows you to see changes you make to a model in all the viewports as you are making them. Very usefull but can slow down systems with a crapy video card.

Now we are going to creat the model. Click on Cylinder in the model tab. Make sure that "Close Cylinder" is checked and change the stacks value to 2 and the slices value to 6. Now in any of the viewports (except the perspective viewport) click and drag to creat a long skinney cylinder.Now click on select in the model tab, this puts you in select mode. You can chose to select vertecies, faces, groups, or bones. Right now we are going to select veticies so make sure that the "Vertex button is depressed and that ingnore backfaces is unchecked Drag a box across the center line of verts to select them. Click on move for the next part.

Now we are going to move these verts up twords the top of the cylinder, but we don't want them to get moved to the side on accident. To do this we just specify what axis to move the verts on and how far we want to move them. For right now think of it like this; the y axis is height, the x axis is width, and the z axis is depth. So we want to increse the heighth of these vertecies so we put a posative numberin the box above the box labeled "Y". What you put in here is determined by the size of your model. My model was 40 units tall so I put in 10, but you can experament untill your model looks the same as the picture. There is another way to move the verts anolg one axis. That way is to uncheck the "Z" and "X" boxes. This allowes you more freedom because you can then manualy move the verts but it can be less precise.

Now we are going to make it look more like a blade. Select all of the verts that are present. Then switch to Scale mode by clicking on scale on the model tab of the control panal. Enter .1 and click the scale button. It should now look more like a blade. Make sure that all of the verts are still selected then enter one in the z scale box, and put 3 in the y scale box. Click scale again. Go back into select mode and select the bottom row of verts, and switch back to scale mode. Make sure that you set y back to 1 and set x to .8, and hit scale.

So it's beginning to look a little more like a blade huh? Were going to start the hilt now. Switch back into select mode but now click on faces as the type of object you want to select. Select from above the top faces, down and across the first row af faces without going over the line of verts, like this.

Now switch to extrude mode and click extrude, then switch to scale mode and set x to 1.2, y to 1, and z to 2. now hit scale. Switch back to select vertex mode, and select the middle vertex of the top row from the front viewport. Press delete on the keyboard. This remove all the faces that were attached to that vert. We did this because those faces won't be visible in the finished model. What you can't see you don't need. Now do the same to the middle vert of the bottom row. Once it is gone create a box in the front viewport like so and go to scale mode and enter .1 in the z box and hit scale. Go back into select faces mode, check the ignore backfaces option. Select the side faces of the box we just made and switch to extrude mode. Now extrude it along the x axis, switch to scale model and enter 1.5 for the y and z axis and hit scale. Now go back and extrude the same distance you did before. Now with the faces still selected press ctrl+n then ctrl+w. This snaps the verts together and then welds the verts that are in the same place creating one vert from four. Repeat the process it you have to to get your model to look like the picture (you can hit ctrl+z to undo and ctrl+r to redo). Once you get it go up and change the side viewport from left to right(or vice versa) and repeate the process for the other side, you will have to change the direction you extruded (if you extruded in the posotive then you would now extrude in the negative and vice versa).

Now I have taught you every thing you need to know to finish the model. I have a picture of it here completed (but not skinned). (hint: the handle is a 2 stack 6 sided non-closed cylinder) (hint: the bottom of the hilt is a box that had one side extruded and scaled then extruded and snapped then welded). I also rescaled the balde becasuse I thought it was to small horizontally. Good luck getting it finished.

There is one more thing you need to know: Smoothing groups. Smoothing groups affect how the model is shown when shaded. Polys with different shading groups appear to be different materials to show this select one face from the model and go into the groups tab on the control panal and assign it to different groups and see what the results are.
That's it for making the model.