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Polygons are used by the original creators only for the mouths of babyz, but there is so much more that you can do with them. Above you can see a couple of babyz who are downloadable from my "Faerie Babyz" page; they show clearly how much fun you can have. Floretta has polygon wings to which I've added some flowers, and Tantony demonstrates not only the polygon wingz but also some polygon work in her headdress. A lot of complex designs are possible using a mix of Add Balls, Linez, and Polygons -- your imagination is the limit! Here's how they work... As always I'm assuming that you're using my easy-edit kit and so you're choosing a .LNZ and editing it in Notepad. So, look for this in your chosen .LNZ file:
[Polygons]
The three lines which start with semi-colons are the usual helpful programmers' comments, the third one being column headers which show what the numbers below will mean. The idea here is that you define a polygon shape, the shape being created by the four ball numbers in the first 4 columns, which will be filled by a colour indicated in the color column. As the comment states, you don't need to specify the lEdge, rEdge (being the left and right edges of the polygon lines) or the fuzz or texture numbers. But of course it is fun to play with those quantities too! If you put a texture in the texture column, and a suitable colour in the color column, your polygon can be filled with a very pleasing effect. The lEdge and rEdge (left and right edge colours) are quite subtle items, but can be effective and help give a slightly shimmery effect at the edges. If you're wondering where exactly they are, the lEdge is the left edge of each line of the polygon, and the rEdge is the right edge of the line. You can see how this works if you make the texture of your polygon be the "clear.bmp" one and then look at the polygon edges on the baby as it moves. As I say, the programmers themselves only used the polygon feature for the mouth, but you can create any area of a baby using it; the most obvious use that I found for it was to make nice thin wingz on my Faerie babyz. To do this I had to first create the little ballz under [Add Ball] and make a note of which ballz were which number. NOTE: there is an extra column which you don't see in the .lnz files but which is created in a babyzfile's .lnz. Usually it's set to -1, which means that you would see the polygon fill, but none of the outline edges. Setting it to 0 or -2 makes it that you see the polygon fill _and_ all outline edges. Setting it to 1 makes it that you see the polygon fill and _some_ of the outline edges. Setting it to 2 or above, or -3 or below, appears to make it that the whole polygon disappears, although I haven't checked evey single number to check, LOL. I wanted smooth butterfly-like wings, so I joined them together with Linez to create the outline effect that I wanted. This was not necessary, but I liked it. If you want more bat-style wingz, the balls will stand out slightly and give a good effect if you don't use Linez along with the Polygons. Of course if you use the Linez but not the Polygons, the wings will be see-through unless you fill them with loads of [Add Ball] ballz and/or criss-cross them with [Linez] lines. You can also get a see-through effect that is delicately textured if you use one of the semi- transparent textures. The point I'm making is that there are loads of possibilities available to you if you make good use of the [Add Ball], [Linez], and [Polygons] sections.
Elfred's wings code Elfred himself is downloadble from my Faerie babyz page. Enjoy! Carolyn Horn
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