Like I said before, the texture on a face is only visible to one side. In the first tutorial we have copied the surfaces in MED. That is now possible, too. First select the whole surface. EDIT --> CLONE will show up the window like in the next picture. Confirm with OK. We have now on the same place two identical surfaces.

Of course the cloned surface has the texture on the same side as the original. The next left picture shows the copy of the surface in opposite direction. We can see nothing, of course, because the texture is still on the other side. With using the NORMAL modifier and the option FLIP NORMALS we will change the side where the texture is visible. Whoa, now we can see it from both sides.

For saving a lot of time, we'll group now the two surfaces with GROUP --> GROUP. Enter a good name "branch1" Now this "branch " has 8 faces.

Next we'll change the so-called "pivot point". This is the center where the surface will be scaled up and will be rotated around. At the moment this is the center of the branch. Of course it would be better if it is near the "trunk". The next image shows how to do it. First open up the window with the pivot settings and then set with using the align option the pivot point of the branch over the pivot point of the trunk. To do this click on the "align" button. Then move the cursor in the top view over the trunk. The align cursor will occur. One click and the align window will be displayed (point 2 in the next image). Align only in the top view only in the Y-direction. Set the pivot point of the branch to the middle of the trunk. It's much easier now to scale and rotate the branch.

The first branch is finished. We'll copy it now. You can scale and rotate the new branch around the trunk and you can alter the height. Then copy again a new branch out of the original. After doing this a few times you'll get a nice tree.

Last thing to to is the treetop. Create a new surface. This one will remain flat so we only need two faces for the front and two faces for the back. To achieve this insert when creating it "1" in LENGTH SEGS and WIDTH SEGS. Follow the same procedure with forming a group, flipping normals and so on. After this move the surface to the middle of the trunk like shown right below..

To finish our tree copy this flat surface and align it with the original so you get an X-style formation. Finished! Delete the trunk and save the leaves with the MAX MDL plugin. If you used several branch textures the exporter plugin will set them among one another! You would then have to do this manually in an image editing program and assign it to the MDL. The plugin does not allow to assign parts of a texture to parts of a surface. In this case all faces will be assigned with the same texture. So if you have a picture with 9 branches on it and you assign it in MAX to 9 different faces, the plugin will drop the whole texture onto every single surface So on every single face you will see all 9 branches. The only help here is to create nine different leaf textures. In every case, the alpha transparency will be lost with the exporter. To fix this you will have to load the TGA skin again in MED (detailed information in tutorial 1).

Mirek Thier (Lolek) März 2002 / translate by Matthias Wermund (xck3001)