Considering the xbox is a really old piece of hardware (unless you're talking about its little brother the 360?) and current PC's and game engines have progressed far above it, yes there is a difference in the number of polygons you can use, the size and type of texture maps applied. For the PC, 360 and PS3 it is far more common for high polygon models to be created and baked into lowpoly meshes.
But the workflow is pretty much the same as its always been: Build model(*build high poly), unwrap model, test rig model, texture model(*create normal maps), fully rig model, animate, export, fix.
no, the hardware that finally renders the stuff is basically the same (very similar). a mesh is a mesh, wherever you take it. And all hardware accelerated rendering we have in most hardware is just rasterising triangles.
of course you can do special tricks like generating higher-order surface from a mesh (real-time subdivision, which could be done on PC or console), but normally (read always) the meshes are rendered unchanged.
Thx for replies - really helpful
- CrazyButcher: Cool! I take it there are no special topolgy rules then when builing ingame mesh for xbox360 compared to pc - a lowpoly mesh is a lowpoly mesh yes?
yes, 3d graphics hardware only thinks in triangles, and as long as you dont model your stuff in nurbs,splines,volumes and expect that to load, you will always export tris anyway.
Replies
But the workflow is pretty much the same as its always been: Build model(*build high poly), unwrap model, test rig model, texture model(*create normal maps), fully rig model, animate, export, fix.
*high poly modeling/baking steps
of course you can do special tricks like generating higher-order surface from a mesh (real-time subdivision, which could be done on PC or console), but normally (read always) the meshes are rendered unchanged.
- CrazyButcher: Cool! I take it there are no special topolgy rules then when builing ingame mesh for xbox360 compared to pc - a lowpoly mesh is a lowpoly mesh yes?