Universal Forum Archive

Theres a stack of lumber-ish bundles against the far wall you can't see in the picture...I'm considering taking out the air vents on the roof to try and limit the file size (currently about half a Mb in Gmax). What's your opinion on it, Junk?

that looks pretty good. but where will the customers put there shopping carts?

also, you might want to save a model of just a parking light. it could be used on worlds as a light, and easily imported into other building models you might make in the future to save yourself the trouble of having to remodel it again.

The shopping carts go in rows just inside the doorway .

I can't really move on without Junk's approval.

Come on Junk...Get with the program...

I've been working on my world some in the free time...



It's a series of floating signs that can display different messages (up to 4)...basically just big flash cards...

Sign
Texture (a bitmap template. primarily blue-255 with numbers in the correct orientation, indicating the card sequence...the image above shows a jpg which can also be used if a background or smaller file size is desired)

nice


*me sneaks into the site and renames the file to match the link (the damn site uses case sensitive file names)

Thanks zar...I forgot to test the links after I posted...

btw, i hope you don't mind, but i also fixed the model so the texture doesn't have to be reversed for it to display correctly. can be done via the model convertor. Tools -> Reverse Face Orientation


on thursday i'll spend some time uptading tuwr with the stuff you've uploaded (including the videos)

I don't mind...

Another one to be added to tuwr directory...




Darth Vader's Tie Fighter...I think GK will be pleased...

Tie-Fighter
Texture

sorry i been busy and missed a week of forum lookin i like it looks great
Junk

Sorry for the delay junk...

Large Store and Template (winzipped)

Fooli what are the maximum model specs that the ATM converter can handle? (I think I've surpassed it )

Oh dear :]

Um, I don't know. It's pretty big. I've got it to load models with a couple of hundred thousand polys. There will be a limit though, and if you've surpassed it, you're doing something inappropriate for the game (if the model converter can't handle it, nor can the game, most likely)

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I suppose then that 700,000 is probably too much...oh well...I knew it was a long shot...

so I resolve myself to making my own 'low-poly' models...like this one I just finished...which includes some nice animations...



Dish array
texture

The dish textures turned out much better than I could've hoped...I might actually be getting good at texturing (famous last words)

Would be great if you could replace that middle part with the head of a monkey, would suit Mit perfectly

Heheh, 700,000 is more than you'd get on an entire world, including the landscape :]

Nice use of submodels and materials there. That'd be a nice one for Jaye or someone to have a go at texturing, too.

27500 polys is still a bit high though :] I guess most of that's in the dishes, which are lovely and round, but... maybe I'd have compromised a bit on their roundness to keep the polycount low.

It all depends on your machine of course, but in my view low poly counts are roughly as follows:

characters - anywhere from a 600-2000, depending on detail. Conceivably higher but you have to bear in mind what happens when you get 25 people onscreen at once... 25x2000 is "a fair few polys" :)

vehicles - similarly... you can get away with a few hundred, or a couple of thousand

buildings - tricky one. You can get away with 12 polys and a nice texture for a cuboid structure. Or 1000, 1500 perhaps, for something with a lot of detail. You're most likely to have multiple copies of a building in view at any time, so - apart from the occasional "special" building (maybe like your dish array) I'd keep these as low as possible.

If you type .profile 1 when you're on a world (I think this works for everyone not just staff) you'll see stats about maximum polycount for landscape and buildings etc. This can be useful for tracking framerate problems but it also gives a good idea of how complex stuff is in general. Type .profile 0 to turn it off again, btw.


Finally... it trebles the amount of work you have to do, but it's worth it... LoDs. Level of Detail... you can keep a detailed model for the close-up views, and make dramatic polycount reductions for medium and low views, which helps massively. Pain in the neck to do but worth it. The model converter manual shows you how to add LoD models (it's pretty obvious really) but building the lower detailed versions is a skill in itself. You can use poly reduction tools (I think Gmax has "multires"?) to do it... the tricky thing is keeping the important bits of detail so the silhouette of the model stays the same, and you don't notice the transition from low to high... anyway, it's a way of keeping your detailed work without crippling the framerate for people with low end systems.
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Oh, and finally finally... the model still has smoothing issues there. Damn you, Gmax! I haven't solved this yet, either.

I only went a little higher than usual on the poly count to counteract the lack of smoothing which can make decent low-poly models look terrible...not to mention it can create some anomalies with the lighting effects...and it's usually much easier to reduce the poly count when it's done, than to increase it.

I used two separate sub-models so I didn't have to worry about over-animating the laser beams, which only use 2 keyframes, when I did the central spinning part which has 20 (I really don't like the oscillating effect under-animating causes) .

Not quite sure exactly how you did it... I'd have done the lasers in the main body of the model and just had one rotating central part, attached as a wheel submodel (using the heli wheel mode). But if you definitely wanted the counter-rotation thing then yeh, only way to do that at the moment is manually.


Have you tried using 3d exploration? The trial version doesn't seem to expire. I only mention it cos it tries to sort out smoothing issues when it converts from 3ds to x... might be worth looking at whether it can help with m3d conversion too. I seem to recall you use Lithunwrap at the moment? That might also be a culprit in the process. One day we'll nail this problem..

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At your request I spent an hour on this. This could be a great model with proper UV mapping.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/6/6 ... rray-1.bmp

I just kinda slapped stuff on due to time constraints. I may be tempted to make a finished texture if it is remapped so that all faces are represented.

yeah...I'm lazy...

I knew I wasn't going to spend much time on texturing so I just did a quick, but somewhat effective job with the UVmapping...

Fooli wrote:Not quite sure exactly how you did it...

made model all at once...animated lasers with a simple scaling...cut the 'spinner' into three sections...did rotation animation on each section...used 'save selected' to create a scene for the lasers-only and another for spinner-only...deleted them from original model...convert, uvmap edit, etc...load lasers-only into converter and animate...same for spinner...load main file into converter...add other two as turrets about the origin...done...

if you hypothetically animated a stationary object...for instance the dish model...by just using a bunch of the same frame...(or if I had animated the lasers with it still in the main model)...would that lead to larger file sizes?...because the converter has to be told to reorient all the vertices, even those that don't move...

or is it smart enough to eliminate info such as move <0, 0, 0>?

If I understand your question... the answer's yes. So, if you had a model with the dishes (stationary) and the laser (animated), it would only increase the filesize for the movement of the lasers, not for every vertex in the animation. AFAIK it only saves the transformation for vertices that move between frames, not for every vertex at once. It would be easy enough to test this theory but I cannae be arsed (cap'n). I'm pretty sure that's how it works, though.

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