Gear Krieg!

Hito

In anticipation to the Nintendo DS WH40K Squad Commander coming out in November and the fact that I'm a Relic fan, and the fact that I think CoH is the prefect platform for a Gear Krieg table top by Dream Pod 9, I made this PzKpf IV Loki for kicks.

245 faces for the mech and shoulder accessories; 2x64 textures for the mech. 2x32 for shoulder weapons.

Joseph Silverman

That seems way above DS specs, man. I've never seen a DS model go anywhere near that in texture size, that's pretty considerable even for the PSP, and there's no way the DS can push enough polies to have several of those + an environment around it.

That said, modeling is pretty cool, and the animation is definitely nice. I'd work a lot more on th textures, though, they don't seem to be doing much for their size.

MoP

Yeah it looks cool but as mentioned it seems too high-spec. Have you looked at it at the size it will appear on screen? I reckon you could lose details like those boxes on the knees, the small details on the guns, the lights on the front around the "head" - all of that can be texture detail and will be indistinguishable at distance. I reckon you can do this with 400 tris and it will look IDENTICAL on a DS screen.
Similarly it should be easy to get this down to a single 256, maybe even less. Work with texture filtering turned off in the viewport to get a better idea of how it will look.

I believe DS can run at 30fps with up to 4000 tris on the screen, so if you have one mech at nearly 1000, you're not allowing much else to be going on, as SupRore mentioned.

That said, I like the animation, it looks nice and heavy, and it's a cool model, it just needs some trimming down. I don't think it will lose any visual impact with half the tris. Give it a try!

indian_boy

agreed with SupRore and MoP. but the piece looks fantastic. good job with the animation too . also, i think [im not one to say, but hear me out] when making something where ur _really_ restricted [ie handhelds' models] u need to consider the view of the model when deciding UV space, and polies spent on particular areas. ie. if its RTS, the "bottom parts" don't need as much detail/tex space, even if the player can zoom in and see from underneath.

i'm not sure, and u should probably not quote me on this, but just my thoughts on poly and tex space usage for handheld models [though i've never made any myself].

Steve Schulze

[ QUOTE ]
I reckon you can do this with 400 tris and it will look IDENTICAL on a DS screen.

[/ QUOTE ]Thats still bloody high for a model that has to share the screen with a fair number of others along with presumably some environmental detail. Cut it down to around 100 polys with one 16 colour, 64*64 texture and you'll have something more feasible for the game type you want. Depending on the size it'll be on screen, you might be able to get away with 32*32. Apart form the fact that the DS has very limited texture memory, you'll wind up with a big mess of pixels when that texture gets squished down to DS res. You're often actually better off erring on the low res side, even if you can get away with high res textures in your engine.

What you've got there would be reasonably suitable for PSP although you'd still need to strip the texture down quite a bit.

Hito

Yea, I went back and trimed stuff down, its down to around 363 for everything you see. The shoulder weapons are 64 or 32 maps, and the mech is in a single 256 texture, I have it out to 128 as well, will try and see how it goes with 128.

This isn't the basic grunt, you'd get one or two of these active at a given time. so around 350 is alright?

thanks for the pointers.

Steve Schulze

Depends what else you want to display at the same time. If you want to render an entire armour division then its probably a bit on the high side still. If you're going to have your mechwarrior and a couple of tanks and a jeep then you might be fine, though theres still the environment and effects to consider.

If you're going to see the mechwarrior as close as your animation suggests, then you should probably consider some LODs. One with the current count, one with about half and one thats little more than a couple of boxes.

Hito

Its a light to med support vehicle, CoH style, so you'd see 2 or 3 of them plus some infantry, plus a tank. the DS Screen is 256x192, this probably won't take up more than 1/4th that space in full view... I'll try to get it down to 250ish.

odium

TBH, you should try your best to get this one down to under 200 polygons MAX and even try a 64x64 res texture, if not lower.

The DS doesn't have the resolution your screen has, remember that (256x192).



Now this shot is at DS res, and I'll be honest even the mech on it at scale I feel is way to big for the screen... But still, take a look at the detail that you can see. A "lot" of the polygons can be trimmed down and removed. The lights can be baked into the main body, the weapons can be simple 3 sided tubes etc etc... TBH you should be able to trim this down to 200 polies and lower no problem, and a 64x64 map is more than enough.

Remember that DS spec isn't all that great. It can pump out some seriously nice things but you have to make cut backs in other areas.

Mark Dygert

It sounds like you're starting to get on the right track as far as specs go. At first I would say your aim was more on the high end of a PSP not the DS. The DS is thankful just to have a few polys to kick around and is still mainly a 2D platform. Depending on the game if it is a locked perspective, you could render your 3D animations as 2D sprites and "fake" the 3D detail.

Lets work on that animation.
Is it hovering then stands up? Because the position of the feet at start and end don't match. It looks like if the feet are on the ground when crouched, then it would step down into the ground when it stands up. Make sure to animate with a ground plane as reference. I'm not sure how you did the shadow (kind of looks like a matte shadow plane attached to the feet?) but it shouldn't move up and down in the scene. What kind of rig are you using? For that matter what program are you using heh?

The settle in is nice

Hito

its all Max, now down to 249 for everything. will try either 1x64 or 2x64; for everything

Its just in empty space with a matte shadow plane. couple of Omni, top one has shadow map at 256, that casts the shadow onto the plane. The camera is moving to follow the increase in height so it looks like the whole thing is floating. I only rendered every 4th frame, the gif is probably 2 or 3 times faster than the actual animation. I didn't bother spending too much time on it just wanted to see it move. The goat leg setup in biped needs some getting use to. The 1st joint pops down right as it puts weight on the feet, I sped through that part to get hide that, and also allowed the feet to slide forward a little while that happens before locking it down with planted keys.

The rig I cobbled together later had similar issues, though not as bad. one IK from hip to knee, 2nd IK from Knee to the 2nd Ankle. It'll probably have to be 3 IKs, one for each joint of the leg with some linking between the IK targets.

Mark Dygert

ahh I see, now it looks alright.

Since the background is a gradient that doesn't shift it throws the animation off if you don't know the camera is moving. I would suggest putting a point of reference, tiny box, tiny Biped, something, so we know where the ground is

Hito

Check 1st post