

	Welcome to Tarzan's Simple Base Tutorial.

Ok - I hope you can read this, because I don't have a microphone, and you're going to have to pay attention to my notes.

Ok?

Now we're going to go make a box in 3ds max (or gmax, whichever you prefer).
Pay close attention to the values I enter for the box.

The 20 x 20 x 10 makes the box consist of cubes.. Also - MC is 70 units tall, so he'll have some head room in a base 100 units high...

Move it to 0, 0 because this makes text data entry much simpler... Don't necessarily move it on the Z axis unless it's already at 0 - you saw how my box
jumped down on the Z axis. That's bad news bears.

Clone it - we need two of these... One is the inside.

Flip the normals, and scale it down a little bit. You're going to have to move some vertices later, but that's no big deal.

Move it to 0, 0 and viola! they line up perfectly.

Look at that mess. Let's clean it up a little.

That first move was the ceiling - it's now at 95 - plenty of inside room. The second was the floor - we want that at 1-ish so there's not a big bump going into the base.

Now we're done in that view - let's go to top view.

Ok - the walls are moved properly now. But that still looks like a mess. Big deal. We're not going to worry about that until we need to. Lets make some doors.

That's rather unusual - I dunno why it's black and purple. But you can see from those blue lines that the normals are facing the right way...

Each of these squares is 10 x 10 units BTW. So we need a door at least 80 x 40. I think that's about right, but I'm going to do 90 x 50 just for kicks.

Ooops - use the selection tool to select, not the move tool - you saw that little jog the faces did. And don't get smart and just draw a box - that makes a mess when you go to delete things  :)

We're going to get rid of the faces that I've clicked.

Those don't quite line up, do they? We'll fix that. And we're looking at the back side of those faces... oops.

Woot Woot. Same process works for windows. Now I'm going to add some stuff to the top to make it look nicer...

BTW - after doing any face creation/deletion, you need to check to open edges... Woot - 0 edges selected = no open edges.

Actually, I'm going to hide everything but the top and back because I'm lazy and don't want to to a buttload of clicking.

Yay! Ok - lets select most of top of the base. Looks like we got some of the back too - hold ALT and draw a box to deselect those.

45 Looks a little tall. Let's do 35.

Bah - that pattern won't line up right... Let's do a different one.

Ick. Nope. There we go. 35, then 10, then 2.5 and bevel a little positive. Better to click and drag the arrows - gives you a better idea of what value you actually want.

Look at all those vertices.... what a mess.

Sorry about the pauses - phone and parents want things.... grr...

Isn't that lovely... Move the two remaining vertices down and weld them. Now we have a ramp. That ramp can be a little shorter actually - the minimum walking angle is 45 degrees, and I extruded it to 150, so it's 100 x 150, which is shallower than 45 degrees.

That was just the basic model - saved in data\scenery\tutorialbase\models with the name "tutorialbase."

Now it needs textures. You can really use anything, but I'm going to make it brick I guess. You won't have that exact bitmap and the shader to go with it, but I do :) Anyway - any bitmap will work. You'll need a shader for it (I already have a shader for that texture).

GAAAAAA!!! - OMG it's hideous! Lets UVW map it. Notice the bricks are still a little stretched... and the ramp doesn't look right. We'll fix the bricks first. 15 x 10 seems to look pretty good.

No dice on the 15 x 10 for the ramp. Lets fix the vertical part first...

Actually, better yet, lets make the ramp something else entirely. I think you'd need to plane map the ramp, but let's experiment with that and then make the ramp have a wood texture... See how we can't get them to fit right? Sometimes s*** happens. New texture time. Although it looks nice from back here. Again, you won't have that texture, but I think it looks OK - you really could have stuck with the brick. There's some metal textures in Icefields and Gephyrophobia's bitmap folders (data\levels\test\<mapname>) that would work well too.

Small frame doesn't really matter - more for neatness' sake. We're going to name it frame and move it. Actually, first we're going to link to it. Oops - see how the entire base moved? Well... now we have to unlink it. See how they're not linked at the moment - there's no subtree structure. I'll show that better in a minute.

Click the link tool, then the base, and then the list. Select "frame" as the parent. Now you'll see the subtree structure in the selection list.

Bluestreak doesn't like Max 9 - locks it more often than not. And there's no Blitzkrieg for Max 9. So I use chimp.

Saved as "tutorialbase" (in Max, chimp will add the .jms automatically. For you gmax users, you'll need to go edit the JMS file and do all that jazz before the next step - tool.)

You need 2 copies - one in models, and one in physics. I think it's just easier to export twice - lol.

This really shouldn't be taking this long... I think Camtasia's making it sloooow. Or it could be that this base is really high poly. I wouldn't recommend using the 20 x 20 x 10 then. Um... try cutting those in half - just keep the ratios the same as the ratios of the dimensions. Anyway - the same rules will apply for any size base. My comp doesn't need to worry about high poly (dual core 3 ghz) so I usually don't care. But some people do...

Those two commands are "tool model scenery\tutorialbase" and tool collision-geometry scenery\tutorialbase." You should get the same messages I did if it was successful. Time for Guerilla.

Dunno why I opened the gbxmodel... don't mess with that. Make a new scenery object. Ok - that was fairly simple. Now we need to make sure the game doesn't think our base is made of dirt. We need to CAREFULLY mess with the collision geometry tag. I'm sure you can figure out that "oldwood" is wood and "brick" is stone.

Now sapien... I'm going to just plunk these in a test map of mine called "testbox" - how inventive.

Sorry for the jerkiness - Camtasia is making my comp run really slow. I think I'm recording in too high a quality.\

Ignore the huge amount of tool warnings I'm getting - I'm using an H2 HUD, and it's confusing poor tool's addled brain. Having testbox as the only map makes CE load MUCH faster.

I'm going to kill that kid. Ok - you saw proof it works... Hope it works for you!!! That's all folks!

