The Shortcuts Guide to Blender... SuperUseful Lesson #1
Importing your 3D Objects into The Movies
(with your own textures, too)
This tutorial is designed to give you a very basic walkthrough for using Blender with The Movies.
It assumes you've already installed Blender and added The Movies Msh Scripts available at http://www.dcmodding.com. (DCMF)
Open Blender
Move your mouse cursor to the top of the main frame until it changes into an up/down arrow, the right click and select ‘Split Area’
Change the ‘Window Type’ of the right pane to ‘UV/Image Editor’
Change the ‘Mode’ of the left pane to ‘UV Face Select’
On the right pane select ‘Image’, ‘Open’
Locate your texture file, make sure it has .PNG extension and click ‘Open Image’
On the left pane select ‘Faces’, ‘Unwrap UVs’
Select an unwrap option, for this example I’ll use ‘Cylinder from View’
Move all of the faces into the desired positions on the UV Image
There are a couple of ways to manipulate the vertexes/faces:
• Right click on a single vertex
• Hit B on the keyboard and select whole sections at a time
• Hold Shift and right click vertexes one at a time
• Rotate the object in the left pane and right click on a surface to select a face
• Hold Shift and right click to select more then one face at a time
Once all the UV faces are marked as you want them, Change the ‘Mode’ of the left pane to ‘Edit Mode’
Make sure all vertexes and faces are select (press A on the keyboard until all the faces appear purple)
Then Select ‘Mesh’ then ‘Faces’ then ‘Convert Quads to Triangles’
Now assign the texture to the object:
• 1 – Click the option for ‘Shading’ on the ‘Panels’ pane
• 2 – Click the ‘Texture Buttons’ Option
• 3 – Select ‘Image’ from the ‘Texture Type’ dropdown options
Click the ‘Load’ button that appears under the ‘Image’ header
Locate your texture file again and press ‘Select Image’
Set the UV settings for your texture:
1 – Click the ‘Material Buttons’ icon
2 – Click the ‘Map Input’ tab on the far right section
3 – Click to select ‘UV’ as the map input option
Change the Mode of the left pane to ‘Object Mode’
For some reason the Movies Export Script seems to like Object Mode the best
Select ‘File’ then ‘Export’ then ‘The Movies (msh)…’
Give your object a name and click ‘Export MSH’
Your mesh should now be ready for use in The Movies.
Note: You'll need to convert the png file to dds format and create any necessary game files depending on your msh type (i.e. .ini, .cos, etc...)