›–» Making your First Object
Okay, so you've read through the first section of this tutorial and learnt all the basic tools and functions of trueSpace. You now know enough to make your first object. So that you can get an idea of the standard procedre for making an object in trueSpace, here is a step by step guide for you to follow through to make your first object in trueSpace. In this guide we are going to make a simple bowl.
Step One, Setting Everything Up: Okay, open trueSpace, set the Shader Attributes and ensure that the World and Object Units are set to Meters. Now your ready to start making your first object.
Step Two, Creating the Object: Now create a sphere object and a cube object, like this:
Next, change the camera angle so your down by the side of the two objects, as if your stood next to them (using the camera reposition tools exaplained in the Introduction). Then select the cube and move it up 1.000 meter either using the Object Information dialog or the Move Object tool. Incase your not sure what to change in the Object Information dialog, you want to change the Z Value under 'Location' from 1.000 to 2.000. This will raise the cube up one meter.
If you've repositioned the camera and moved the cube correctly it should look like this. Now select the sphere, choose the Object Subtraction tool and click on the Cube to subtract it. You might wanna change the camera angel again now so your looking from above again.
Now it should look like this. At the moment its just half a sphere though, we need to hollow it out so it looks like a bowl.
Select the object and press CTRL + C to make a clone of the object. Then using the Object Information dialog move the object 0.100 meters up and change it so it is 1.900 x 1.900 meters in size so it looks like this.
Then select the bottom half-sphere (the first one) and choose the Object Subtraction tool and then click on the other half-sphere and it should look like this.
Step Three, Applying A Texure: Now you've created your object, its time to put a texture on it.
Right
click on this texture and select 'Save Picture as...' and save it
somewhere on your computer. Then open up the Textures
Dialog in trueSpace, select the texture and apply it to the
whole of your object with this button ( 
) and it should look like this.
You may wish to change the U and V Repeats to make the object look a little bit better. Or even Paint solid color on the inside of the bowl to make it a bit more realistic. When your happy with it, move on to the next Stage.
Stage Four, Scaling your Active Worlds: Okay, so now you have your objects made and textured. You need to make it the right size for Active Worlds. At the moment it is much too big. Using either the Object Information dialog or the Resize tool, set the Object Sizes to 0.400 (X) by 0.400 (Y) by 0.200 (Z). Now it looks really small in trueSpace but will be the right size in Active Worlds.
Now it's the right size, you need to sit it just above ground level. So change the camera angel so your at ground level (like pictured below) and set the Location Height (Z) to 0.0200 and it'll look like this.
Congratulations,
you've made your first object. If you would like to render it to
see what it looks like, change the camera angle so your up above
it again and click on this button ( 
) which you'll find on the bottom left of the toolbar near the camera
angle buttons.
Step Four, Saving your Work: Now all you have to do is save it and Convert it if you want. If you havent got as far as conversion in this tutorial yet, don't worry; Active Worlds supports using .cob files aswell as .rwx. Once you've done that, put your .cob or .rwx file (depending on whether you have converted it) into a Zip file (using winzip or whatever) and upload it into your object path (into the models folder) and upload the texture(s) into your textures folder if you havent already got it (its in the AlphaWorld object path).
It's a good idea to keep all the textures for each object together with the objects in a sub-directory. Also be aware, If you move the textures, you may have problems opening the file in trueSpace as it won't know where to find them.
If you don't have an object path and/or a world and you would still like to view your objects then you can convert them to .rwx using one of the Cob to Rwx converters and then then you can download Modeler and view it with that. Note: If you use 'Cobdump 3 by Hamfon' objects tend not to work in older versions of modeler due to an issue with RWX extensions.