How to approach modeling a tank track with wide spaces in it

Creepezel

That's the tank track I'm deling with. It's part of a model I intend serve the purpose of a world decoration (not going to be animated, it would just stay still somewhere) but I got stuck in this part. Low poly version of this track have 28K tris, together with main body it have 120K tris what is quite too big. I did read the tutorial from Gaijin Entertainment but, can't understand much from what they said, can't even find a video tutorials that would show such process.

So, could it even be possible to turn this, into straight continous band ? But I'm not even sure how to bake it. Guess I would have to make a normal map, then in color map I would have to remove some pixels to create an ilussion of these empty spaces ? Any other ideas ?

Klunk

why a band ? you would only be looking to do that sort of thing for an in game model.

Creepezel

Klunk said:

why a band ? you would only be looking to do that sort of thing for an in game model.

This is intended to be game ready model. That's why I care to make these tracks as low on triangles as possible.

poopipe

Totally possible, it won't stand up when the camera is close by but for a lod it's exactly what you'd want to do.

Simply make a low poly that is a continuous band and bake to it. Assuming you're baking in painter or designer you can bake opacity and then use a shader that supports it

Creepezel

That seems to work. But, to cover empty spaces between layers of band, I should just add flat face in between them ? Then I guess, ID map will be needed to, so material won't be placed on the entire band.

Shrike

Sometimes you just need to change the design to fit the polycount. 
Either you use alpha and bake it to a big rectangle strip or you dont use alpha and cut down the holes

You could also do 3 strips, center with alpha, 2 opaque on the sides, and a bunch of cubes for the middle piece but that would cost a good bunch more, but this track is just not very good. It dosnt look great and I doubt its very practical. The reason to have tracks is to have a wide surface contact area.


Here are some tracks I baked (these are not for first / third person but similar principles)

Left side is the LOD1