Step 4 - Creating the barbed wire top

Now we're going to create the final section of our fence, the barbed wire top.  First, we'll create the metal "frame" that holds the wires, then the wires themselves.  I'm not going to go into as much detail in this step of the tutorial as I have in previous steps.  You should be getting a feel now for how to manipulate objects in Blender.  If you're having trouble following along from this point forward, I'd recommend Googling some general Blender tutorials and then coming back to this one when you've mastered the basics.

Switch the 3d view into object mode and and add a new cube object to the scene.  Grab, scale, and move the cube in object mode or the cube's vertices in edit mode until you've thinned it out to a narrow strip that looks something like this:

Add a couple more cubes to the same mesh object by duplicating the verts/faces in edit mode.  Scale, rotate, and manipulate the verts until you have something resembling this:

Note: this top "wire holder" piece is a single Blender Mesh object.  If you created the top wire holder using 3 separate mesh objects, you can join them together into a single object by selecting them all and pressing "ctrl-j".

Change the new object's name to "Frame".

Load the "brushedmetal.png" image file into the UV/Image Editor window.

Switch the selection mode in the 3d view to "Face Select" (ctrl-tab) and select all of the faces in the "Frame" mesh.  With the 3d view in "Edit Mode" and all faces selected, press the 'u' key to bring up the "UV Calculation" menu.  Select "Unwrap (Smart Projections) from the menu:

Go ahead and use the default settings in the "Unwrap 1 Selected Mesh" dialog that appears (hit OK):

You should end up with a UV mapping that looks something like this:

The "brushed metal" texture that we're using isn't very detailed, and will probably just appear as a solid gray color unless the player's nose is pressed right up against it.  The initial UV map here is probably good enough, but you may adjust and scale the islands as desired.

With the 3d view in edit mode and all faces still selected, use the image selection pulldown in the UV/Image editor to assign the "brushedmetal.png" image that we loaded earlier to the selected faces.  The "wire holder" rack is now complete.

Next up, we're going to create the barbed wire.  Add a new plane mesh to the scene, then scale and rotate it into place:

Load the "Barbwire.png" image file into the UV/Image editor and then UV Unwrap the new mesh using the "Unwrap" option on the UV Calculation menu.  Assign the Barbwire.png image to the face of the plane using the texture selector pulldown in the UV/Image Editor window.  Adjust the UV mapping until the texture is properly tiled:

Once you are happy with the texturing on the first strand of barbed wire, duplicate the object (shift-d, we don't want a linked copy this time).  Move the new object up along the wire rack and repeat until you have four strands of wire:

Now we are going to combine the four separate wire objects into a single object.  Hold down on the shift key and right-click each wire object until all four are selected.  Press 'ctrl-j' on your keyboard to join the objects.  Rename the new mesh "BarbedWire".

Next, we are going to make sure that the drawing order for the new translucent wire mesh is correct.  Parent the "BarbedWire" mesh to the "Pillar1" object so that the "BarbedWire" mesh becomes a child of the "Pillar1" object.

Save your file now.

Open the exporter user interface and navigate to the "Shape->Materials" panel.  Select the "Barbwire" material by clicking its name in the list on the left.  With the Barbwire material selected, turn on the "Translucent" option in the material properties:

Go ahead and Export to DTS now.  After exporting, close the exporter and save the file.  Load the exported dts file in Torque or Showtool pro to check your work.  You should have something that looks like this:

This concludes the Exporting Meshes and Textures tutorial.  In part 2 we will learn how to add multiple levels of detail (LOD) to the model.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• You may notice that you can walk through the fence when it's loaded in Torque.  Don't panic, you haven't done anything wrong :-)  We'll need to add some collision meshes to the fence before it will block the player.  We'll be adding collision meshes to this fence in tutorial 3 - Adding Collision Meshes.
• You may want to change the mesh shading mode on the pillars to "Smooth Shaded" and add an edgesplit modifier for better in-game lighting and a smoother appearance.