Freespace and Freespace 2
Model Texturing Tutorial

Lesson 2 - Creating our first object

Now that we have established our default settings for using Truespace, we can begin to create the shapes that will make up our model. For now, we'll create just one very simple shape, a cube. This will be the only object in our model. Click on the Primitives icon and another window will open showing the default shapes that we can use to create our model. Left click on the cube , and the main window will show the object we selected near the center of the work area, automatically assigning it a default size and texture. The next thing we'll have to do is change the default size to values that will make the object proportional within the Freespace universe. Right click the Object Tool icon , and an Object Info window will appear showing the default placement and size that Truespace assigned to our cube. In the Object info window, you will see the default values for Location, Rotation, and Size, along with the name of the current object, and its number of vertices and faces. Also, there is a checkbox for Dynaunits, along with buttons for setting the scale of the World and Object coordinates. Note that the Object coordinate scaling does not have to be the same as the World scaling. Keep the defaults for Dynaunits, and World and Object scaling for now. Let's change the size of our cube. We'll make the X value 100.0 centimeters ( 1 meter ), and the Y and Z values to 50.0. Change them by typing new values into the boxes and pressing Enter on the keyboard. Modifying these values changed our cube into a rectangular box. Look at the pictures above and on the right and you'll see how changing the size values modified the shape of our model. Since the X size is larger that the Y size, our model 'points' from the lower left to the upper right. We'll use this as a reference for the orientation of the Object axis. Object Axis orientation Our model is now much smaller than what it was before. Let's zoom in the display a bit to get a larger view before we go on. Then we'll save our model before we begin applying texturing. In the main menu at the bottom of the screen, click on File, then Scene, and finally Save. Our model will be saved in the current directory with the file name newscene.scn. Remember that the Truespace2 demo only saves *.SCN files. If you wish to save the file into a different directory, or save it under a different filename, then select SaveAs... A standard windows dialog box will pop up and will let you select the directory and specify a different filename. Make sure the checkbox marked Ascii is turned off. Since SaveState was selected in the Preferences menu, the next time we load our model should return us to this same view. That's it for creating our model. It wasn't so hard after all, was it ? Make sure you save your work ! In the next lesson, we will begin to apply our texturing and make our model 'come alive'. Lesson 3 - Texturing our model (part 1)