Pie Slicer Guide Part 1:

Ok, first of all I’ll start by telling you the hotkeys you’ll be needing the most:

V : Select/ Deselect Individual Points.
C: Select/ Deselect All points.
N : Select/ Deselect Current Polygon.
B : Select/ Deselect All Polygons.
Ctrl + F : Flip Polygon Facing (The direction that textures will display in the game).

Those are about the only keys I really use, so I’ll leave it there for the time being.

I think I’ll show you how to create a very simple body like the viper. Basically, once you know the basics of manipulating points and polygons, and texturing, the rest is plain sailing.

1: Starting a new project.

It’s a good idea to have some idea of what you’re gonna create. I normally sketch a design on paper and work from that.
I find that a good way to start is with a basic polygon such as a square. From here, you can add extra points and polygons to start forming your model. So go to the Polygons menu and go into the Add simple polygon sub-menu. Select ‘Square’.

Pie Slicer defaults to the Back View, so change to Top View for a moment before adding the new square. When you select the polygon you want it’ll look like this:

Just rotate it until it is even and click your mouse to confirm it:

Notice that there is a little circle at each corner plus one in the middle. These are points. You can use them to create new shapes, then link them together to form a new polygon. Click on one and press ‘V’. A little blue circle appears around it to confirm that it is selected. Be warned, that if you start moving a point and don’t realise that you have other points still selected it will move all of them. So always remember to use Shift + V to deselect all points then select the ones you want to move afterward.

Right, how to move points to where you want them:

These are the buttons you’ll be using a LOT. The left set of buttons are for moving individual or multiple points up/ down/ left/ right/ back/ forward. Pretty straightforward. I don’t use the next one, but feel free to have a play and see what it does (it’s one of those things that’s always there but never used for me). Rotate and scale are pretty self-explanatory. I normally scale things at a factor of 1.1 or 1.2, but occasionally go down to 0.4 or 0.6 for finer adjustments.
Try bandbox selecting all points (like selecting multiple units in the game), and moving them around and scaling. You can change how far points move with each click by changing the Move Rate. It defaults to 1.0. Move it down to 0.2 or 0.1 for fine movement or all the way up to 10.0 for stupidly large movement.

The right-hand pane shows how many points and polygons are currently in your model. This is a good way of seeing when you have points selected as a ## appears next to ones that are:

2: Making the Body.

Right, so we have a square. That’s not gonna get us anywhere on it’s own so let’s add another one. Select all the points apart from the centre one, and shift the polygon up by about 3 notches (Move Rate 1.0). Now deselect all points (keep doing this, eventually it’ll become second nature to automatically deselect all points before continuing). Click on the centre point (which should now be below the polygon) so that an orange circle appears around it; this indicates that the point is active, but not selected (press V and it will turn blue indicating that it’s selected). This point is where any new polygon will be centred:

Active Point,

Selected Point,

Add a second square, making it roughly the same size as the first one.

Note that the currently active (not selected) polygon is the coloured one. If you right click in the view port it will make the polygon closest to where you clicked active. You can also use the right-hand pane to select polygons:

Now to make these two polygons into a box which will form the main hull of the body. Click one of the points on one of the polygons to make it active- again it doesn’t need to be selected, just active. Now go to the Polygons Menu and select ‘Draw Polygon Using Points’- the 3rd one down in the menu. A line will appear connected to the active point and to your mouse pointer:

The line will automatically link to any available point, as you will see in the shot above. Click to confirm that this is where you want your first line to go. Now, using the pic as my example, move your pointer to the lower-most point and click, then to the next one up and back to the starting point to create an oblong.

Click Finished and it will ask if you want to create the new polygon. Click yes and a new polygon will be created. Simple! A quick note here on the Ctrl + F hotkey I mentioned above. If you look at the new polygon you will see a little red line on one corner facing either in or out from the poly. This represents the direction the poly is facing.

The colour isn’t too good as I’m using Jpeg’s to keep the file size down, but you can just make out the line in the above pic. It’s facing inward, which means that any texture on this polygon will be facing the wrong way when displayed in the game, meaning you won’t see the texture on the unit and will instead see whatever terrain you’re fighting on. Use Ctrl + F to flip the facing so that it faces outward. Check all your polygons for this and make sure they’re all gonna be visible when making a new model. I always check every poly as I create it so that I don’t miss any.

Ok, add new poly’s for the other three sides to create your box. Your new body isn’t gonna look too good like this so we’ll add a nice sloping front for the cockpit. You should still have a point not doing anything in the centre so click this to make it active. Press V to select, then move it forward 5 or 6 notches (Move Rate 1.0 again). Now move it left so that it is level with the side of the box:

Now go to the Points menu and select ‘Add Point’, then ‘Centre of Selected Points’ (note that this means selected not active, so make sure the point you just moved is still blue). A new point will be created on top of the one you just moved. The right-hand pane will tell you which point is selected. Move the second point so that it’s level with the right side of the box.
Now, using the Draw Polygon Using Points command again, make 4 new polys to create the nose of the body, not forgetting to check each poly’s facing:

That’ll do it for now. So all that needs to be done before texturing is a bit of re-scaling. I’ve purposefully made the model huge (this is about the size of a full map square) as it’s easier to work on when starting out with pie slicer. Obviously a viper-type model should be much smaller so set scale ratio to 1.1, select all points (shift + V) and scale the model down so it looks more like this:

See the four grey lines that intersect the blue axis lines? They form a square, which is the size of a Warzone Tile, so you’ll see that the model is now much nearer the scale of a viper body. That's it for this part, the second part covers texturing your models.