About ChilliSkinner...
What is ChilliSkinner?
It's a software application written in MAXScript for 3DStudio MAX. It consists of a collection of utilities with a common user interface that can be used individually or separately to make the process of 'skinning’ (UV Mapping)
low polygon 3D models for much easier.
What does ChilliSkinner do?
ChilliSkinner is NOT a 'one click' solution that will instantly create the perfect skin for your model. Rather, ChilliSkinner is a 'Tool Set' of very useful utilities that provide various functions that can be used at each stage of the model mapping process to make that process much quicker and much easier. See help for a breakdown of these functions and examples of their usage. I cannot overstate enough that the best results will be obtained by those who are willing to spend some time and effort learning the skinning process and manually intervening especially at the 'Detach Polys' stage (see tutorials for more details).
How do I use it?<
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Download it, see the 'Readme.txt' for install instructions, run from within 3D Studio MAX. There are many methods you can use to skin your model... and many tutorials out there on the web to help you... Start with the
skinning how to tutorial which will show you one such method, the one that hilliSkinner follows. Then refer to the help and tutorials on this web site to learn how to actually use ChilliSkinner. Remember, the model skinning process isn't an easy one... be patient. Remember that most, if not all of ChilliSkinner's utilities can be used individually, if you prefer to completely detach all the poly groups from your model yourself and just use ChilliSkinner to unfold them then that's fine, in fact this is mostly how I work with the software. No software AI would be able to split the model up exactly as a you yourself would.
What does ChilliSkinner cost?
Nothing, nada, nichts... and none of your Earth pounds. Yes, it's free.
What if I can't get it to work or it fails?
Whinge for a bit... Check if your problem is covered in the relevant 'Issues' page in the downloads section, if the problem you are experiencing is not there then please mail me and whinge to me... I can't fix bugs and improve things if I don't know that people are experiencing problems with them can I? ;) Please remember though that ChilliSkinner is not a commercial product, I will do my very best to help but sometimes work, family and Unreal Tournament mean I can't devote time to ChilliSkinner issues
What else do I need?
Well, you'll need a utility called 'Texporter' or its equivalent to actually generate the bitmap at the end of the mapping process. Oh, and after you've had a play with ChilliSkinner, you need to email me and tell me what you think about ChilliSkinner.... if you love/hate it... what you think could be done better... etc. ;)
I don't understand some of the terminology?
In all tutorials I try to use the 3D Studio MAX naming convention so... three vertices are joined together by three edges to form a face. A number of attached faces form a polygon or poly. Most of the tutorials assume a beginner-intermediate knowledge of modelling/mapping practises and terminology, there are many
modelling tutorials on the web to help you if you don't meet these prerequisites.
Chilli... why did you write ChilliSkinner?
Having recently had occasion to work on some Unreal Tournament in-game models over at www.unrealfortress.com it became apparent to me that from a modeller’s perspective there are three stages involved in making a game model; 1) the actual modelling of the object in 3DStudio for example, 2) the preparation of the object so that it can use a bitmap ‘skin’ and finally 3) the actual painting of the bitmap. Now stage 1 is great, lots of fun because you get to ‘shape’ the object in your imagination into something a little more tangible. Stage 3 is also fun because now your object has shape and form you want it to look even better by creating a pretty skin to wrap around it. That leaves us with stage 2… the preparation of the model. Hmmm… could be I’ve missed something somewhere, but it seems to me that this stage is really laborious, non-creative, boring.... Typically if I take an hour to complete a model and an hour to do the bitmap for the model, then the bit in-between takes me at least two hours and is often trial and error because it’s easy to make a mistake and even then the end result isn’t perfect. Finding
this unacceptable I set about designing and writing this little piece of MAXScript to allow me (and hopefully others) to do this a lot, lot quicker.
Disclaimer and License Stuff
ChilliSkinner is now on version 3.0.x and now it's only the third thing I've ever written in
MAXScript (actually that's quite a lot really isn't it?!) which has possibly the worst language editor ever (think
Notepad) sooo.... be forgiving please... there's not much error
trapping being done in there (mainly cos it ain't easy to do in MAXScript) but everything works if you provide it with that
which it requires. I thought about making it in to a Plug-In and
hiding the source code... but decided against it.. so this release
at least is Open Source covered by the GNU General Public Licence.
Credits
Very special thanks go to Nathan 'Azm0' Fletcher for his excellent coding advice and fast typing. James 'Pete The Cheat' Chapman for helping me resurrect Pythagoras, Trigonometry and Vector Mathematics from the murk in my brain... To David 'dines' Durrenberger for the nice logo and link button. Henry Wrightson for optimising the AI in the Arrange routine. Paul Ramster for recurssion code help and being there to bounce ideas off and (mostly) talking sense ;) Also to Kam Lai for being brave enough to actually delve into the ChilliSkinner code and coming up with some great ideas for improvements.
Also I'd like to thank casManG www.cschell.com
for his superb model skinning tutorial... this is the method on which ChilliSkinner was based... I read a lot of these tutorials, from different sources, all basically the same.... this is still the best I've seen
though.
Chilli
30th April 2001 (updated)
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