Wings 3D - Making Textures

If you start with one of the provided templates, you can use Wings in combination with any 2D paint program to texture your model. The steps to do this are:

1. From the Window menu on the Geometry window, select Outliner. The Outliner window shows you all the components of your model.
2. Left-click on the item "Default Sculpty Texture". Release the mouse button, left-click on the texture line again and then drag and drop it onto the "Sculpty Material" line. When prompted, choose "Diffuse". (There is a quirk in the Outline window that requires separate actions for first selecting an item and then doing something with it.) Your model should now be wrapped with a pattern of black lines and colored squares labeled with letters. This is the default texture, with the required Sculpty UV map. The pattern will guide you as you are painting your texture.

 3. Have Wings create a new file for the texture bitmap by right-clicking on the "Default Sculpty Texture" and choosing Make External. (Remember, when using the Outliner window, the context menu refers to the item that is selected, not the item your mouse is over. If the context menu doesn't contain the options you expect, it's probably because you forgot to first select the line with a left click.) Name the texture file whatever you want, but be sure to choose a name that distinguishes it from the sculpty bitmap file.

 4. Open the file you just created in your favorite paint program. You should see the texture that is wrapped around your model in the Wings window. To help orient yourself, select your whole model in Wings and open the UV Editor window from the Windows menu. You should see the same texture bitmap you see in your paint program.

5. Now put both the Wings Geometry and UV Editor windows in face selection mode. (That's the third icon of four in the middle of the icon bar at the top of the window.) Now, when you choose a face of your model in the geometry window, the corresponding area of the texture in the UV Editor Window will also be highlighted. Use this as a guide to where you should paint with your paint program.

 6. Proceed to paint your texture. Wings will not reflect your painting as you work, but when you want to update Wings' view, save your file in the paint program, right click on the texture line in Wings' Outliner window and choose Refresh.

7. When you are satisfied with the results, you export the sculpty bitmap file from Wings. The texture file you painted is ready for use; it is not processed by Wings.

I have also included a video of myself going through this entire process.

I painted the image quickly using photoshop. Its important to make a new layer and temporarily make it transparent enough for you to see through so you can see the grid as you paint. When I finished painting in the video, i forgot to un-transparent-ify the image and had to go back and fix it and resave the image.

Information on making textures for Wings 3D was found here:
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Wings_3D_Exporter