Zmodeler Tutorial
Randell Magtoto
yeah i tried makin a vw passat it is harder than you think but the tutorials do teach you a lot!!!! the software is decent but is far from perfect...even if you cant be arsed makin cars the french site www.grandtheftauto.fr is fannytastic it has over 1000 cars to choose from and the download speeds where fast even with my 1mb/s broadband!!!!
The title shouldn't say Full Guide, 'cause it only tells you how to use the software, basically. Maybe you should post the info on how to do the whole getting it into San Andreas thing. The furthest you can go is export as dff file,
yeah, It doesn't say anything about making dummy's either, what is neccasary for San Andreas. However, the Zmoderler site got a pre made dummy that you can use. And you also can make it on V1 first, save it normal and than open it with V2. All works.
Before you read all of it and try yourself at modeling you should know 1 important thing: The model is only one half of the whole thing, the second part is the texture, there are usable pics/textures around the net but being able to make good textures favours the chance for making good models.
If you really cant stand making textures than you will probably find yourself soon enough with tons of great models but no textures for them, though maybe you can find someone who likes to make textures and you can team up with him.
And of course you will need some good painting programm like adobe photoshop, paint shop pro, or whatever you want to use. (DONT ask here where you can download those painting programms cause they cost money and this forum doesnt allow warez talk).
When you install zmodeler, make sure you install it in english, the first time i used zmod i installed it in german and it was rather annoying cause all my tools had different names then in the english tutorial i was reading which gave me huge problems to understand what i was supposed to do.
Every model in gta3/vc consists of these triangles and any kind of shape is possible (ok theres always exceptions, you cant make a perfect round sphere) but we are not aiming for high poly models anyways.
Go to any view except of 3d, uv, or user view and create the cube by using the left mouse button, the first click defines the center of the cube, then you can move your mouse to adjust the size and click again to create the cube.
Allselect tools are always bound to the right mouse button, all other tools are bound to the left mouse button, so now you have the single selection tool on your right mouse button and the move tool on your left mouse button.
You can now select the cube with a right click and move it by holding the left mouse button on it and draging it around, as you can see the whole object as its own is moving, lets try the move tool on other levels.
If you want to switch from edges level to vertices level you might get the first little problem since you cant just click on the vertices level icon and then right click on the model which is in edges mode.
You might noticed while trying to move vertices on the cube that 2 vertices at once have been selected, this was caused by the activated multiple button, another thing that happened could have been that multiple vertices moved at once, this was caused by the activated selected button.
Now lets just take a look at the front view, the only locations that we can see in the front view are the location of a point in the height and in the width, we cant see how near or far the point is in depth, thats why we have the axis center in all views (except of 3d view) and when you look at the left or top view you realise that the axis center defines a point in 3d.
You might wonder now why we need the axis center, lets say i would create a cube in the front view, how should zmod know where this cube should be located in the left or top view without the axis center?
Thats what the axis center is there for and you can place it anywhere in 3d space just by placing it in multiple views, to place it just press "." (without the "" marks) on your keyboard and the axis center will be placed where your mouse cursor is.
Before you make a model its always very useful to make a plan in your mind of how you will do it, this might save hours of work, sometimes i spend more time thinking about how i should do something than it actually takes in the end.
I have made this jetski just with 7 cylinders and merely used the scale and move tool to get to the shape of it, first i tried to do it differently and failed but then i realised that i could do it much easier just by modifying cylinders and since then i mostly work with them and our katana will be only made out of 4 cylinders.
Lets make the next object, choose the cylinder again in the objects bar () and click right in the middle of your existing cylinder in the front view, make the cylinder about twice the size as the handle.
At the moment it all rather looks like a hotdog than a katana, we now have to scale the tsuba a bit but first we hide the handle, you can do this easily by just clicking the handle in the objects list and it will hide.
Now we do about the same as we did with the handle, select the modify\scale and the select\single tools again, select and scale the tsuba in the front view on the vertical axis so it isnt complete round.
right click the handle and you will see the menu in the picture above, here you can hide/unhide, select/deselect objects the fast way, now unhide and deselect the handle, you will now be able to move the tsuba while the handle wont be affected, yet you will see it in the background.
And another thing, when you do such things as leveling vertices with other vertices they might seem prefectly leveled on the first sight but if you zoom in you will see that they are still unleveled, thus its always best to zoom in as much as possible, that way your model will be the most accurate (and we are striving for perfection, arent we?).
Note, selecting all vertices of an object or selecting the object will result the same way when scaleing, so we could also just have switched the blade into objects mode and scaled the object but its faster just to select all vertices instead of switching modes forth and back.
The last frame shows how it should look like after you moved the vertices, as you see i got rid of the wireframe and enabled "flat shading" to see everything a bit better, you can enable/disable these 2 modes in:
Note, it doesnt matter if your model doesnt look exactly the same as mine, in the end we are making a model from scratch and it has to look good in your eyes, you might for example like the front of the blade not to be that round so just do what looks best for you, you should be able to since we learnt how to move vertices in all directions.
Unhide all objects and bring the handle into vertices mode, we dont really need as many vertical steps on that handle, i just personally like to make more so i have some as reserve if i calculated the amount wrong
Deselect all vertices and reselect the last 2 steps, then scale them vertical and horizontal in the front view, then deselect all vertices again, reselect the last step and scale it in the front view a bit more until you have something like this:
click on vertice 1, then on vertice 2, then on vertice 3 and so on until youre at vertice 10, after you clicked on vertice 10 hold down ctrl, now as you see your mouse cursor will turn into a text saying "done", this means that if you now click again you wont create any new faces and the tool will so to say "stop".
This is due to the reason that we created all the faces in the front view instead of the back view so they are all looking into the opposite direction, so theres 2 things we could do now, we could just delete all the faces again, switch the front to the back view and draw all the faces again, OR the better solution:
We will need to rotate it so select the cylinder on objects level and choose the modify\rotate tool, make sure you have both, the horizontal AND vertical modes selected, then in the front view left-click and hold it, then move the mouse downwards/upwards to rotate the cylinder so the left and right edges become vertical aligned:
Note, the rotate tool can be a bit messy as it doesnt provide that much control while doing it manually, theres another way to use the rotate tool when you hold ctrl and then click on an object, then you can basically enter the number of degrees the object should be rotated but this has never worked properly for me, i dont know why but it doesnt rotate into the directions i want it to, might be a bug of zmod, i rotate manually for that reason.
here are some basic facts, if you dont understand them then you wont fully understand how normals work but it doesnt matter if you dont get it yet, you will understand it better once you have experimented with it:
The blue arrow in the top view should show how we are looking at that particular vertex in the 3d view, we are looking right into the normal thus that area is reflecting so much light and is so bright.
This all sounds extremely complicated, basically all a normal does is to define how light is being recieved by the surface and then reflected in the same radius as recieved, so the direction a normal is pointing at is important.
We have normals in real life too, only that a whole surface is full of them, means in real life the whole surface is reflecting whereas on our model onlyour few normals can reflect, so basically, the more normals we have, the smoother the light reflects.
Again, the black line is the surface, the red dot is the vertex, the green line is the vertex's normal and the square with the gradient is to illustrate how the surface would be shaded in the current state of the normal.
In the picture above you will see that the shading of the normal rotates with the normal itself so if we would look at the surface from the blue arrow it would be light too, you can test this yourself(its not part of the katana, just so you can see how the movement of a normal affects its surface):
c80f0f1006