opinion on some props please

Flat Tires

Hi, making some props for a friend's game and I'm new to crunchin' the polys. The poly limits for each item was 200-femur, 400-axe, and 210-doll so I managed to meet the restrictions for each model, but it was kind of tough.

Any advice on cutting corners or some mistakes I made would be nice, thanks.

indian_boy

personally i think that the limits are too high. but then again, that's assuming that these objects are never up close to the players pov?

if they're small items that'll be scattered all over the floor, or otherwise far away from the player's view, then u could do with reducing some of those horizontal cuts on the femur and the axe. lots of wasted polies cuz of the excessive horizontal cuts.

oh, and 'welcome to polycount' :grin

Flat Tires

yikes the counts being to high is the last thing I was hoping to hear . I think the pov is third person. I agree I probably could have taken several cuts out of the axes handle, thanks

Ott

Unless you are modding for a Super Nintendo, these polycounts are fine. You need to realize that we aren't in the 1980s anymore, and your computer / platform can handle a LOT more polys than it used to. Even modding for a PSP has some impressive limitations. Granted, if these are small small objects, keep the counts low....and you also need to realize that you need to pay attention to traingles, not polygons. A 500 sided polygon might still be 1 polygon, but its hundreds of tris. This is bad.

The biggest limiting factor to your game is going to be texture sizes / amounts / numbers.

As far as the models go, lots less "left and right" iterations, and more silhouette edges. You could make the axe a lot more badass if you would take out half of the edges in the boring, mundane handle/shaft.

Mark Dygert

They look pretty good. IB and Ott bring up some good points I would follow their advice and modify the models accordingly. After that the next big hurdle is getting them unwrapped in a fast, clean, optimized way.

The counts could be considered fine if most of those polys contributed to detail or helped you create optimized UVs. Over modeling something is still wasting polys no matter what platform you're on. Of course everyone runs into the delicate balance of taking the time to optimize and getting the model done on time.

It actually is acceptable to build in extra geometry if it will help create smaller textures. For example the axe handle. If you optimized it you MIGHT have to use a 256wx128h because the handle would contain long polys. More than likely it would also have more dead space since the rest of the model really doesn't have long polys in it or you would have to squish the long polys to fit on a tiny square texture. If you put a few breaks in the handle you can break the UV's up and you could fit them on one 128x128 with no squishing. Seams become an issue at this point but there are more than a few tricks to get around that.

- You can unwrap and paint the handle as one long UV on the default channel1. Then when all is said and done, re-unwrap it in chunks assigning this new UV to channel2 and bake channel1 into channel2. This method isn't really recommended for normal mapped models as you can get some really wonky lighting at the seams. However if you think ahead you can build some geometry details into the handle, like a metal rings at each of the seams.

Examples:
Example
ExampleUV
Notice the sword blade is broken up in the UV because extra geometry was added.

PrayingMantis

Thx for sharing this technique vig, it's really usefull.

Flat Tires

Thanks Vig I see what you're saying about splitting the neck up to save the uv space that's a cool technique.

Sorry Ott I keep sayin polys, I did mean tris. I did accidentally think I was finished with a few of the props before I realized they needed to be triangulated though so that was fun, heh.

Not sure where I could spend the tri's I'd save by removing the side-to-side splits in the axe though. It came with a pretty specific reference. Putting more of the cuts into the head part would help give it more detail I guess?

-edit made a little sword to practice your technique since the axe is old news now, any better?


By newman3d at 2007-08-12