Queen of Pain Wing Question

Haftoof

Working on a model right now for Queen of Pain and was curious what people have done with the wing-flap. Is it worth remodeling the wings or utilizing the existing 90 tri wing-flap?

I'd like to use the existing animations and I'm curious if its better to retopo the wings or if anyone has any experience with cutting down the poly-count on them.

Any thoughts?

Swaggernaut

I'm not really sure what you mean... Could you give some images explaining your issue?

Haftoof

Basically, are the flaps that come with the base model the most efficient modeling of those flaps or can you save poly count and still utilize the existing animations and have it look good?

What have other people done with the wing-flaps.

Vovosunt

Pretty sure everyone modeled the "flaps" themselves. The efficient geometry depends highly on your model... Just don't forget that you have to make it two-sided manually.

Haftoof

Roger, I've never worked with double-sided flat geometry, how do you force it to be double-sided? Some vague searching looks like its just an option under the shader settings in maya.

belkun

As Vovosunt said, everyone has to model the flaps themselves, so no reusing, and even if you did, you wouldn't be able to make it double-sided unless you edited the VMT, and that's not something usually recommended, because it also essentially doubles the triangle count of your model.

So yeah, you need to model your own and create geometry for both sides, which you can do by just duplicating the faces on one side and inverting normals.

Haftoof

That seems very counter-intuitive if you wanted to make use of the previous geometry and change it to meet your needs. So the original model uses double-sided single layer geometry, but anything created needs to have two layers of polygons, one for each side?

belkun

Haftoof wrote: »

That seems very counter-intuitive if you wanted to make use of the previous geometry and change it to meet your needs. So the original model uses double-sided single layer geometry, but anything created needs to have two layers of polygons, one for each side?

Well, you're not really supposed to make use of any of the previous geometry. Sure you can, but Valve may not like that, and it's kinda pointless IMO to reuse things from the default loadout.

But yeah, anything you create needs two layers of geometry.

Haftoof

Well I was mostly looking at the geometry for the purposes of deformation with existing animations. People reuse the animations all the time, which is why I come to the question of how for the existing QoP wings, valve used a single layer of geometry as far as I can tell (I may be mistaken).

Also I look at sets like this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=128804&highlight=QoP&page=4

Which appears to be a single layer of geo for the flaps.

Guess I'll build out the flaps and see how bad it is, import the base-mesh into the engine with some crude weighting and see how the animations look. Probably the best way to handle it once I get the poly-count worked out.

belkun

Haftoof wrote: »

Well I was mostly looking at the geometry for the purposes of deformation with existing animations. People reuse the animations all the time, which is why I come to the question of how for the existing QoP wings, valve used a single layer of geometry as far as I can tell (I may be mistaken).

Also I look at sets like this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=128804&highlight=QoP&page=4

Which appears to be a single layer of geo for the flaps.

Guess I'll build out the flaps and see how bad it is, import the base-mesh into the engine with some crude weighting and see how the animations look. Probably the best way to handle it once I get the poly-count worked out.

Yes, Valve did use a single layer of geometry because they make everything double-sided through the VMT, but we can't, or perhaps shouldn't do that. It's not really possible to tell from that link if that particular mesh is double sided, because after all, it's the exact same geometry on the same place (or with some very slight position change) with inverted normals, so you can't really tell by just looking at a lowpoly.

I worked on some wings for Queen of Pain before, which are actually in game, and I had to duplicate everything and invert normals for the backside. Her wings have a pretty decent budget, so it's honestly not something you should really be concerned.

Haftoof

Roger, thanks for the thoughts and confidence, I'll see how I handle the wings and how bad the animations would mangle the base mesh. Appreciate the thoughts.

belkun

Haftoof wrote: »

Roger, thanks for the thoughts and confidence, I'll see how I handle the wings and how bad the animations would mangle the base mesh. Appreciate the thoughts.

No worries! I had the same concerns about the wings I linked, and in the end everything turned out really well, with animations working out smoothly.

Baddcog

It's really not that big of a deal. Takes about 5 seconds to clone>invert normals.

Just do it before rigging and 'push' the verts out a bit so they aren't in exact same space (or you'll get clipping most likely)

If you use 'double sided' on a material, it just recreates those polys automatically, it doesn't save anything in game.

Vovosunt

++ to what Badcogg said.
Copying and reversing normals is what one would usually do.

JamieRain

I had to do something similar with skywrath mage on a set I havent finished yet. You can select the faces and extrude them out. Then merge the 'outer' verts except the verts on the top view. If she uses an alpha for transparency then you can do some pretty low tri count stuff. Now that I think of it QoPs wings dont have much movement to them and if thats truely the case then feel free to go even lower. Just dont forget to have thickness at the top and not merge those verts even on the in-game lod. Then paint your alphas and have the lower mesh verts closer together so the alpha isnt making the texture too far apart.