BogSims Institute

Poor Wings3D. It gets a lot of flack from people who've never tried it. Part of the problem is that it's not very well documented and nobody has really bothered to explore it for TS2.

For this tutorial, I'm going to make a rock. It should cover most of the little twiddly things that aren't very apparent at first, including the all-important Tesselate command. Remember: Tesselate. All-important. Tesselate.

The first step is to make sure your Advanced Menus are activated. Click Edit>Preferences...>Advanced. Click Okay.

We're going to make a rock like these. Make sure you know what the different selection modes are...

Vertex Mode
Line Mode
Face Mode
Body Mode

Now rotate your camera so that the blue line (the Z axis) is facing you. The red line should be to your right. All objects in TS2 face the direction that blue line is going, got that? ;)

You might also want to download these scaling models to help you get your proportions straight when making meshes. Otherwise, it's very easy to make monsterously huge or microscopically tiny meshes.

Now create a cube.

Not that we'll be using the whole cube. Naw. We'll just rip its face off. (Make sure you're in Face mode.) So select the face in front.

Right-click and choose Extract Region.

Choose Free.

Put 'er somewhere with the bottom level with the grid plane.

Delete the cube.

You've probably noticed it's too... um, fat. Right click and choose Scale Axis.

Choose X.

It should look something like this.

It's taller than it should be. So go to Vertex Mode and select the top two vertices. Only the top two.

Select Move.

Select Y Axis.

Go into Line Mode and select everything except the line on the bottom.

Press 5 to separate the selected lines into five sections. (Larger stones should have more sections.)

Now, press Z to give you a straight-on Z-axis view. Move the camera up, down, left, and right using the arrow keys until your project is dead in your sights.

Next, choose Tweak mode. This will allow you to click and drag vertices. Right-click once you are done to exit Tweak mode.

Move the vertices around until it looks... um, rocky. Something like this.

Go to face mode and DE-SELECT your object. Then select ONE side of it. Just one. If you have both sides selected, it'll screw it up.

Now choose Extrude Region.

Choose Z.

Extrude in the same direction the face you've selected is facing. You should get something that looks like this.

Go into line mode and select the outer rim of the object on both sides - except for the bottom.

Right-click and choose Bevel.

Move the mouse until you get something like this.

Now for the all-important detail of tesselating. Pay attention here. When you create a mesh, it will sometimes have holes in it that you don't even realize are there. SimPE will have a fit if you try to import meshes like this. Tesselating fixes this. Also, it's going to help us make a proper rock.

Go into Face Mode and select the entire object. Right click and choose Tesselate.

Yup, you have two options here. What you want is Quadrangulate.

In Line Mode, select the new lines you've created - bottom line included. Once done, right-click and choose Connect. (Or just press C.)

You should get this.

Go back into Tweak mode. Move the vertices around a bit to make your rock more irregular. You might also play with the Magnet tool at this point by pressing 1. (Press 1 again to turn it off and use - and + to alter the spread of influence.)

You should get something like this.

You've probably noticed that the bottom is no longer flat. This is easy to fix. Pan the camera until you can see the bottom. Make sure you're in Face Mode, then select the bottom faces.