Making a simple model

Sometimes all you want is a box.

Make sure you have the tools you'll need for this job. As stated elsewhere, there's plenty of good documentation on the modelling process with these tools.

Lets say you wanna get a cube shape quickly and unartistically into the engine. our cube will need 5 sides, 2 triangles per side. the bottom portion will have it's triangles deleted so myth draws it without any ripping or tearing. (image)

An important thing to understand here is that myth does not do proper depth sorting automatically. Objects behind or in front of models may be drawn in the wrong order. This is the main reason why we remove the bottom side from our cube, and as a general rule of thumb always delete triangles from a model that you will never see.

putting a nice texture on this cube isn't important. myth won't be able to draw any models unless it has textured surfaces, so we need to dress it only basically. in this instance we'll throw on a low res crap texture, something 32x32 pixels, and we won't worry about mapping it or cleaning it up. (image)

mesh grid alignment is a good thing for basic geometry. myth has an easier time rendering it correctly, units will move and track around it's shape with less problems, and it requires less manual work in apathy. our cube is gonna be 3x3x3 cells in volume. (image)

it's scale within your 3d editor of choice isn't important, but the proportions are. use apathy to tag the most basic attributes it needs.

the name is also unimportant, as long as it's unique from everything else. i'm gonna call it 3x3 cube, and it's character tag will be Ôcub3'. once you get around to exporting this, it should generate 4 files in the same location as where the 3dmf original is. the 4 files are geometry (this stores the 3d data and texture mapping data), model (this references the geometry tag and is the marker file that is placed in loathing), collection (this stores your textures for the model) and collection reference (a sortof CLUT reference file that the collection needs to do it's job). (image)

you will need to take these 4 files and place them in the appropriate subfolders inside your myth2: local folder. (image)

loathing will show your model tag in alphabetical order. neat how small that warrior looks compared to our crappy cube. see? (image)



Links Index

Pages 2-4 cover the use of Apathy. Pages 5-6 cover
the model making process in detail. Page 7 takes you
to where you need to get more goodies.

Page 1 - Documentation Overview

Page 2 - The GUI

Page 3 - Touched by a triangle

Page 4 - Affecting mesh cells and vertices

Page 5 - Making a simple model

Page 6 - Making a complex model

Page 7 - Other Tools