This is the largest stumbling block for most people you want to make their own model. The process can be very simple and quick or....... long, time consuming and generally difficult depending on how you create the basic model or mesh.

For the purposes of this tutorial as i used Lightwave to produce the chicken mesh i will show how it was made it in Lightwave. Most of the commonly used 3D modelling programs are good for creating the model (examples being: Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, 3D Studio and Alias/Wavefront NB\ These are also very expensive!). For those of you who do not have access to programs of this level i will add a basic tutorial for creating a model in MDL at a later date.

MAKING THE CHICKENS HEAD:

Providing you have a reasonable idea what you are going to make you will need to make a descision on whether to make your model from either deformed standard primitives (ie. cubes, spheres etc.) or on a polygon by polygon level.

With the chickens head i started with two cubes which i then bevelled to create the eyes. I then deleted the un-nessesary polygons and joined the two together (select the points to join by selecting them - click on the points button on the bottom left of the screen then goto the tools menu and click either merge or weld).

The rest of the head was made almost entirely by creating points (goto the polygon menu, click on points, place the point and hit enter). Once you have three points select each one in order (use the points button at the bottom left of the screen) create the polygon (in the polygon menu click on make). To check whether the polygon is facing in the correct direction check in the preview window. If the polygon is facing the wrong way simply select it (click on the polygons button at the bottom left of the screen) and in the polygons menu under the transform section click on flip.

MAKING THE CHICKENS BODY:

If you have mastered the basics concerning making the head you should now be competant enough to make the rest of the body. Lightwave has plenty of very usefull modelling tools especially in the Modify menu, also you may find bevel to be a very usefull tool (select a polygon and press b). As you become familiar with Lightwave you can produce models extremely quickly and efficiently.

NB\ In order for the model to be useable the models mesh will need to be made entirely from triangular polygons. If it isn't this can be rectified easily in Lightwave by going to the polygon menu and under transfrom click on triple - this should solve your problem. It should however be noted that doing this will often send your polygon count flying.

Finally when creating the model try to keep the amount of polygons you use low! The chicken model, although simplistic still contains 189 polygons. As a general guide i would try to keep your polygons down to below about five or six hundered.

A tip i would recommend is when producing the 32x32 icon for your skin/model providing you are fairly familiar with Lightwave is to render a picture of your models head. If you have applied textures to it even better. More advanced users may want to use the metaNURBS function to remove "jagged" edges that you may get with low polygon meshes (Hit TAB then goto polygons, and under the curves section click on freeze - see picture). If combined with textures - which can be taken from the final skin texture this can look quite impressive!