Gunblade Tutorial

[Deo]

Noob> Waaaah! I want a gunblade! Deo, help me out!
Deo> Shuddap maggot! You want help? Well take a gander!

The first thing of course is to get yourself a copy of Metasequoia and Model Viewer. If you want a link, that's too bad. Should have found it the first number of times that was posted.
Now to the second part, choosing a base weapon. I, myself opened Model Viewer and scanned through various swords and found this little beauty, the Greed Scimitar. Oh yes, look at all the points, and if experience has taught me anything, there's nothing wrong with extra points.

Now, Just click on the little button at the bottom right labeled Dat to Mqo, select Main for weapon, and type in a name for this little project.

Now, open Metasequoia. If you already know about this, why the heck are you reading this? (Drop and give me 20!) Anyway, the area marked in blue is your tool kit (Don't forget it).

Now, click on the 4 colored squares, you'll end up with a selection of views. My personal favorite is the blue set with a perspective shot on top and a left-side view at the bottom. The Magnefying Glass is your zoom, the green icon is for panning, and the purple one is for rotation. To use them, just click and drag.

Double Post Edited:
Now, click on File and go to the folder where you stored Model Viewer. Then enter the folder titled "Model" and select the Mqo you made previously. You should end up with this:

Now, go to the area that was marked in blue. Of that area, all you really need is the section labeled "Edit." Select "Rope" and draw a line around the blade. Make sure you cut in somewhere to exclude that peice of handle inside the blade. You should have only the blade selected in green.

Back to the Edit bar and select "Move." You should see a yellow cube surrounded by cones. On the top view, you will see a green cone for Y axis, blue for Z, and red for X. Clicking and dragging on those will move them along their appropriate axi and keep your movements straight. Clicking and dragging the yellow cube will move on all three axis, only use this on the bottom screen so that you will at least be lined up on 1 axis (Never use yellow on the top screen).

Now, move the blade away from the rest of the weapon so you can have more space to work without interference. If you didn't notice, a little table will show up when you clicked on the Move button. You can use that if you don't trust your mouse hand.

Now, we zoom in on the ring at the end of the handle. If you look really close, it's not attached to the handle either. Not only that, the ring shape makes a perfect pre-made bullet chamber (Well, almost perfect).

[Deo]

Now, follow the light blue line to select the ring using the Rope. Make sure to exclude that handle.


Move it away from the handle.


Now, rectangle the whole ring and click on the Rot Button (Rotate). Grab the red ribbon (ball if older) and move the mouse. You'll see the numbers on the Rotate table increase and decrease along the X axis (similar to the move button).


Now, rotate the ring 90 degrees along the Y axis (Green). You can either use the mouse or punch in the numbers on the table with the "Y-axis" button held down.


Notice that the inner ring has a wider section then the outer ring. Take the left side of the ring and pull it out.


Turn on the Scale Button, grab the yellow box and pull until the top and bottom matches the outter ring. Pulling on any of the other squares will only scale along the axis.


Ok, here's the plan: We can only cover one side of the bullet chamber, so we're going to cover the back end. This will make a cup instead of a cylinder. Just shrink the back end, make it smaller than then handle width (Yellow cube).

[Deo]

Now take the rectangle and select the remaining tip of the handle. Stretch it out for height. Then pull it out for length.


Now, if you haven't noticed, the hand guards are firmly attached to the handle. This limits our details for the trigger guard. What we can do is grab the tip of the upper guard, shrink it, and rotate it 180 along the Z-axis (Red Ribbon/Ball).


Next step is to move it to the bottom, shift the trigger to curve forward, then pull out the bottom guard to form the trigger guard.



Now take that bullet chamber floating up there and move it over the front of the handle.


Now, you can just give up here and just slap the blade back on the handle... or you can do a good job and rework some details into the blade.


First, we need to flatten out that blade a bit so we can work with it more easily. Select a large section of the blade and raise it up to the other half.


Then take these three jagged edges, activate the scale tool, push the Y button (green), enter a 0 in the number box, and hit 'OK' to flatten it out.

[Deo]

And now the hardest part, making the hammer. Words fail me to explain this, so I just recommend you follow the position of the colord dots from left to right, then move down.


The width of the hammer's base is the same as the blade's width and will interfere with the look. Grab that little dot and scale it down the X (Red) axis down to 0.2 (20%).


Now, grab those two dots with a rope and pull it up over the ridge where the jagged edges used to be. Pull it a bit to the right so that it connects with the top of the incline.


Whoops! that hammer is way too big. Rope it, Use the Scale button, Pull on the Yellow square, and shrink it down to a smaller size.


There's something a bit off center with that hammer. Just grab two of the points and move them as indicated in Red and Blue.


The blade shape is looking a little sharp towards the base. Just rope that point at the top of the incline and pull it to the right until you get a reasonable line marking the edge from the flat of the blade.


Rope or Rectangle the entire blade and move it over the bullet chamber and handle, like so.


Save your changes and get your butt back to Model Viewer! Go to File and select "Convert Mqo to Dat." Pick your mqo file and you're done. Play with the animations and make a nice pose.


Uh oh! There's a little problem there! She's not holding the gun by the trigger! Go back to Metasequoia, Select All button, then move and rotate until that trigger is past her index finger. But Hey! If you don't mind where she holds it, I don't care.


Now, this isn't done until you recolor and reshape the blade to look like the above picture, but we already got a guide for that and you already know how to move dots around (by now hopefully).

Ok, folks we are done!! Have fun modding.

Edit: I made this off the top of my head without using a picture. This is not modeled after any particular gunblade. If you want to use the one in the first picture, there's a link in my sig. It's the last one I've uploaded.

[Stromgarde]

I'd just like to say that's an impressive job you did there using only Meta. Have you explored VRS much?

[Deo]

I downloaded VRS, but it's too confusing. For starters, not much of a mouse-heavy interface like Meta. That alone could slow an hour job of Meta to a week-long job. Reading the Kilandor tutorials, they recommend using Meta for most of the work anyway.

[Taskmage]

*snip*

Had a problem with the images for some reason. Fine now.

[Stromgarde]

I'll agree with you there; VRS is a hell of a lot harder to use than meta, but the amount of power it grants is staggering. You can attatch materials, increase texture resolution or add new ones, as well as create new polygons/vertices. Oh, and change skeletons to port (relatively) easily from one race to another.

That being said, if you can accomplish what you are setting out to do for a particular project without it, by all means! Not worth the headache. However, I will say that it does become more... managable once you figure out how to use the keyboard shortcut features. R for rotate, j for group select, h for indiv. selection, etc... it's still a pain in the ass, but the rewards can be very much worth it, especially if you're one to have an obsessive eye for detail such as myself.

[Ryadbraman]

need a different host for your images... I can't see any of them. :/

[Deo]

Bah, geocities = (Too Weak). Hosting from LS site.

[Sinbreakerblade]

I think this need a sticky

[Gulkeeva]

O_o
Really nice indepth tutorial

[Sinbreakerblade]

Wow you guys did sticky this lol

Now this tut is alot easyer then the other one lol

[sinistre]

In the 5th image in the yellow circle, I don't have those different squares

[Deo]

Don't know what you're talking about.

Sounds like you ignored the direction to click on the icon with the 4 colored squares which will turn your 1 window into 4 windows, each give a view based on an axis.

The 5th pic shows the blue selection, not what you should see before clicking.