Part VII: Point to Point Modelling

This is more of a patience ability rather than a modelling one but it can come in handy for fiddly things.

Unfortunately this method can produce to scary high poly stuff so not everything you make with it will be suitable for Morrowind. You just have to be careful with the amount of detail you use.

Let's not fuck about. Let's get started. I'll say one more thing about this type of modelling. If you can't do it you're either as dumb as a bag of rocks or you have the patience of three year old.

First thing we need is a picture. Something fiddly that would be a pain in the arse to model by extrusion etc.

Google images to the rescue. I just typed "Jewellery Pendant". Now. I don't just want something that has an odd shape I want something flat so I can use it as a texture when I'm done.

As this is Wings I thought it apt to create a wing. This is what I am going to use. Remember to make sure that your image is square and a decent size (Mine is 1024 x 1024) for texture quality and save it as a PNG.

With Wings 3D open and ready to rock 'n' roll, right click the screen anywhere and select "Image Plane".
Select the image you have just saved and it will appear in the centre of the screen.

Go to your Geometry window and lock in place with the padlock.

Now right click again and make a cube

Select on face (in line with your image plane as above) and then change to Vertex selection mode.
This will highlight the four point of the selected face. Now press "delete".

The cube will collapse and leave you with the above.

Now arrange your camera to a better angle as I have below and in Body mode select the cube. Now change the mode to Edge mode selection.

All the edges on the cube will now be highlighted so right click and select "cut". This is a learning curve because we don't know exactly how many cuts we're going to need. Looking at my wing picture I'm going to throw in a guess of "8". So do that.

Now select Body mode again and then right click, "Move", "axis". And move the cube quite close to your image plane like so;

Now press "A", followed by space to centre everything and make sure you have cleared the selection completely.

One more step or so and we can actually start modelling our wing.

Now let's select "Orthogonal view" in the top right and press "Z" or "X" depending on where you placed your first cube. You should just see a flat grey face looking at you.

Now we're going to make it transparent so we can see our image place underneath it.

In the Geometry window click the cube icon on the right to activate the wire frame view as above.

As is always good practice press "Space" before you start. Then select the Vertex mode above.

This is where the tedium comes in to play. There is going to be a lot of space pushing and clicking in the next 10 minutes but the end result is usually worth the effort.

Always start in the top centre vertex. Highlight it (this can be hard to see) and then right click, move, free and move it into place.

Now we need to follow the vertices around the cube and drag them into the shape of the wing.....

Note: Remember to press space to clear your selection once you have dragged your vertex into place.

At this point this can be as rough as fuck. Don't worry too much about getting it perfect.

This is how mine looks after completely going around the shape.

I'm now going to tidy it up a little (not a great deal because I can't be bothered!). We need to zoom in to offending areas and select the edge that we don't like. Right click, cut, (number of cuts) to add vertices.

For mine here I'm going to add 2 more vertices by cutting this edge into 3.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

After painstakingly going round my shape and adding the image as a texture I ended up with this;

Just in case I made a cock up while moving the vertices (if you select normal move for instance things can get strange) I'm going to select the face, right click. Flatten "Axis" (it was Z for me)

While you have that face select, right click, Extrude, Normal. Then extrude it to the thickness you want your pendant to be.

UV map the rest of it and add the texture of choice and you should have something like this?

Of course you would spend a lot more time on the texturing side if you wanted to use it in a game etc but for this tutorial this will have to suffice.

If you're not sure about UV mapping then check out UV Mapping a table here for some reminders.