How do I Re-top these Tank Treads?? D:

RashedAlmetrami

In a bit of a modelling pickle... How would I re-top these tank treads? I'm currently hand-modelling each piece but it's gonna take me days. Any suggestions?

Current attempt is colored red 

CrucifiedJunk

https://wiki.warthunder.com/index.php?title=Creating_a_3D_tank_model#Creating_tracks

ShikukuWabe

What do u mean, you only need to model one and then duplicate along spline with one of the several tools max has to offer

musashidan

How did you create the high-poly mesh?

cupsster

I'd go with one modular piece instead of whole track, or maybe 3-5 at max to create some variety, that way you save lot of space in texture to have details in it and better bake and material definition. Then duplicate one LP model along spline and randomly swap out pieces for the ones that you retopo (in case you made more  unique pieces). That would give you better texture usage and more variety at the end and as a bonus you could animate them nicely. Going full thread at once does not have any sense. you can still animate whole merged track at once but it will deform by spline which is kinda weird.

RashedAlmetrami

Hey guys and thank you for the replies! I built the HP using one Track piece which I copied along a spline. Issue is that the Polycount would be ridiculous If I had say 100 Track pieces (minimum, it's probably more) at 500 Polys each. The tank itself will hopefully be under 50k Polys so adding another 50k on for one model is bad practice surely?  

musashidan

I'm sure you could model each piece at way lower than 500 polys. NM will pick up a lot of the non-silhouette detail. Remember that a player's view of the track will be limited(unless player can crawl on the ground)

And a modern AAA tank at 100K wouldn't be that crazy. It's not the polycount but the on-card vertex count that determines the hit.

RashedAlmetrami

Ill give it a shot, thank you for the advice! Could you elaborate what you mean by 'on-card Vertex Count'?

Bek

That refers to the 'real' vertex count after splits from UV seams/hard edges are taken into account. See here: http://tech-artists.org/wiki/Beveling

or more locally here: http://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts#latest

if you want a very lowpoly tread, you'd just have a tiling texture for the top/bottom/sides, which would pan as the track moves. There should be plenty of examples of this online.

musashidan

There's a great Maxscript that I use called Ubervert. It will calculate the actual vert count(plus percentage values for each aspect of calculation based on how optimised they are) that the engine will see, exactly as @bek has stated.

RashedAlmetrami

Handy little script, thanks for the help guys!