Pie Slicer Guide part 2

Ok…now we come to the fun part; texturing. You’re probably wondering how in the hell we’re going to get this model looking anything like the viper just using pie slicer when there aren’t any rendering facilities or other fancy gadgets you might find in 3D Studio Max, for example. Well, quite simply, warzone doesn’t require fancy gadgets.

Look immediately to the right of the main viewport and you will see a second viewport. This is where your textures are going to be displayed. On the far right pane, click the second from last button to change it to Texture Alignment mode:

Now look down the bottom of the screen. Notice the command buttons have changed to Texture related commands:

To start with you will need a Texture Page to work from. Warzone has 19 different texpages (as they’re known) that you can use to texture your models:

Page-6-features.pcx
Page-7-barbarians.pcx
Page-8-player buildings-bases.pcx
Page-9-player buildings-bases.pcx
Page-10-laboratories.pcx
Page-11-player buildings.pcx
Page-12-player buildings.pcx
Page-13-player buildings.pcx
Page-14-droid hubs.pcx
Page-15-droid hubs.pcx
Page-16-droid drives.pcx
Page-17-droid weapons.pcx
Page-18-fx’s.pcx
Page-19-fx’s.pcx
Page-20-fx’s.pcx
Page-21-fx’s.pcx
Page-22-fx’s.pcx
Page-23-fx’s.pcx
Page-24-fx’s.pcx

In the above picture there is a text box where you type the name of the texpage you want to use. In this case we want textures for a body so we will be using page-14-droid hubs.pcx. Type this in and the texpage will appear:

You can enlarge the viewing size by simply dragging the window to the left. You’ll no doubt recognise everything on the texpage, but how do you transfer this to the model? Simple. You’ll see that the polygon you currently have selected is being displayed in the texture window. If you click and hold one of the points, you can move it around:

Basically it really is just as simple as dragging the polygons to the right texture on the page and aligning it however you want it to appear in the game. You just need to check the number of each point in your polygon and make sure they’re all facing the right way on the texture you’ve chosen for the model.
Change the right-hand pane to Polygons Mode (the second button) so you can easily select the different polygons. Select poly 0 (this should be the first square you created, now the top of the body). It should consist of points 1-4. If you look at the top left of the texpage you will see the texture that was used for the viper. You can use the Move buttons to move the entire polygon at once, rather than point by point so move it up the page so that it is here:

Check which numbers correspond to the front of the body; in my case it’s numbers 3 and 4, so they’re facing the wrong way. You can use these buttons to stretch, rotate, and mirror the texture:

Use the bottom right button to flip the texture horizontally so that points 3 & 4 are facing the front of the texture, then drag each point so that it fits the texture nicely like so:

Do the same for all the other poly’s in the model:

One last thing to do is to add 2 connectors. Connectors tell warzone where a turret should be placed, or where the firing effect should come from (on a weapon), among other things. So a new body is going to require 2 connectors, one for ground unit turrets, and one for vtol. From the Points menu select Add Connector -> At origin (0,0,0). Use V to select the Connector and move it so that it is more or less centred on the top of the model:

Add a second Connector below the nose of the body to indicate where vtol weaponry should be placed:

Note: add a connector to the end of a weapon barrel so that the firing effect displays in the correct place.

That’s about it :)

Now save your model!

Hey Presto, you have a new body. Ok, so it’s nothing special, but from this you should be able to progress quickly into making nice new bodies like the Anaconda Project Super Heavy I’ve made, or models from Star Wars- anything that takes your fancy ?

A couple of quick pointers:

* Weapons come in two parts; muzzle (barrel) and mount (turret). All muzzle gfx are prefixed with GN (example- Gauss Cannon is GNHGSS.pie), and all mount gfx are prefixed with TR (Gauss Cannon again is TRHGSS.pie). You should create weapons with this in mind so that the barrel moves up and down independently from the mount.
* Propulsion also comes in two parts; left side and right side. Open a prop gfx file from the game to get an idea of how it works.
* Extract Warzone.wdg (the whole file) to a folder and find the effects folder. Open any of these in pie slicer to see how the weapon fx and such were put together. It’s very simple to make your own custom special fx for new weapons you’ve created.
* You can easily copy something from one pie file into another by using Copy and Paste. Just select the polygons you want to copy and select copy selected polygons from the polygons menu.

And on a finishing note: using pie slicer dx you can see how your model will look in the game. Here’s the model we’ve just created:

It will look better in the game because pie slicer doesn’t currently filter textures like Warzone does.

And here are a couple of examples of what can be done with pie slicer:

An A-Wing from Star Wars by me

An X-Wing from Star Wars by Bateman

Anaconda Project Super Heavy Body by me

Anaconda fully tracked up with my custom Twin Assault Gun

Anaconda fully vtol’d up with my custom Twin HPV Cannon

And from the back :)

Well, I hope this helps you to get started with pie slicer, if you have any questions just post in the forums, I’m always around. Later,

-----:::::Dancing Moogle:::::-----