noob question, spare the rath

greenmachine

wow, first off i gotta say there is some amazing art on this forum and on the war genderals competition page. i have been keeping track for the last couple days and i cant wait to see how those models turn out.

so i am new to the game art field and have never completed a full game art model. so i have one question, and it may sound stupid to everyone out there who knows what they are doing, but hey i figure its best to ask.

i have noticed that there is a lot of normal mapping going on in the war generals comp. this is cool stuff, but i wanted to know what the order in which you create your models. i mean, do you model the high poly version first then model the low poly mesh after and around the high mesh. or do you model the low mesh first then just simply add detail to that model until you have your high poly model.

i hope thats a clear question. if you dont feel like explaining it to me, just drop a few links to something that might be able to give me some guidance.

thanks all. and keep up the great work.

Hollowmind

There was a thread about this before. Most seem to do high first then low. But some people prefer low first then high. It's pretty much whichever the artist is more comfortable with.

cholden

I prefer to create the high detail mesh first, then build the low poly based on it. What really matters is what works best for you though.

Mark Dygert

If I have time high to low.

when its crunch time, I don't have time to go crazy and model all the detail, so I go low to high. I end up choosing to paint some normal map details instead of model it <GASP>! Most of the time I mix the two, in the end it doesn't really matter.

The crappy thing about normal maps is you end up having to learn how to model low and high poly.

Eric Chadwick

Not a dumb question at all. Welcome to the boards.

Well here's that great thread from the old boards.
Normal Mapping: Which model do you build first... a poll
But it seems the Gamespy server's been reset recently, I keep getting sent to the polycount home page.

Anyhow I happened to save it, but it uses MHT format, only openable in IE I think.
http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/files/polycount_normalmapping.zip

greenmachine

hey thanks for the quick replys, greatly appreciated. thats cool that there are a number of ways to do it. i guess now its just a matter of getting down to the nitty gritty and creating a model.

EricChadwick - thanks for the links, great help.

Kevin Albers

Once you get around to baking out your normal map, I recommend you also learn how to bake out ambient occlusion. There are a couple of threads around here on how to do that. A good ambient occlusion bake can give your diffuse texture a nice start, and is pretty easy to do.