Virtual Tipis

...The tipi is a portable home created by the Native Americans (First Nations). Today they're made of canvas but the earliest were made of skin, which could be tanned to be soft or left as rawhide to get stiff (like rawhide chewtoys for dogs). For some really beautiful pictures, click here.

...Working with my virtual lodgepoles, in 3DS MAX R4, I made a very interesting discovery: The portion of the pole that sticks up past the top serves the purpose of counter-weighting the outside skin on the opposite side. If the poles bits on top were too short,the tipi would sort of look "sucked in." So that's why big tipis have a tall spray of poles on top!
Shift + Click here to download furcadia.tipi.zip.

Isn't this tipi just crying out to be personalized, decorated?

To decorate them, first screen-capture a picture of the unpainted lodges. Eyedropper one of the colors (it doesn't matter that much which one). Make an empty picture of just that color. Add one transparent layer, and paint on it, using a 1 pixel brush with 22% opacity. Flatten the layers, then save as a .BMP. Import it into FSHeditor.exe as a .BMP. Position it as desired. This way, you can make a whole village, and have them all look different.


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