Radius Mech [DS]
Helping out a friend with a DS homebrew project he's working on. Had to be under 500 tris with a three weapon loadout that might be interchangeable with other weapons.
The design I came up with was rather ambitious for a 500 tri character, so I really had to be stingy with my distribution. I think I came up with something fairly true to my concept, but I'm still tweaking it out and trying to crank out any extra tris I can get. There are additional tris remaining in the budget so that I have a trigon buffer to play with for the other weapons.
The rear weapon modeled would be a bazooka instead of the artillery in the concept.
Shooting for a 128 tex map.
The design I came up with was rather ambitious for a 500 tri character, so I really had to be stingy with my distribution. I think I came up with something fairly true to my concept, but I'm still tweaking it out and trying to crank out any extra tris I can get. There are additional tris remaining in the budget so that I have a trigon buffer to play with for the other weapons.
The rear weapon modeled would be a bazooka instead of the artillery in the concept.
Shooting for a 128 tex map.
Replies
Model in screenshot is an unmirrored half.
Not sure how the DS handles rendering, but on a "normal" GPU it would be better to keep the UV map connected more, as every extra vertex on the UV map is an extra vertex that has to be rendered (See tech forum sticky).
It is also generally adwisable to plan the UV map with the pixels in mind, if the texture is of such a low resolution; e.g. keep the lines strait most of the time, never mind the distortion in most of the cases.
Oh and no chance to fuse some vertexes on the middle line? Seem like a waste for most low poly meshes to stricktly "mirror model" them.
Edit: A 128x128 seem to high for the DS. After all it on has something like 240x120 screen right? No point in making a texture higher resolution than the screen is actually capable of rendering (think of the screen size of the mesh).
All UV shells are aligned with the defining edges and flow of action of each piece (i.e. the leg UVs are aligned to the axes of the legs). Drawing a straight line on any part of the texture will flow directly down or across the part of the model as aligned to its axis. The UVs on the stomach/torso section are intentionally slanted diagonally so that straight lines can be painted to the shell border which translate into V-shaped scale segments after being mirrored, giving the appearance of perfect diagonal lines without pixel stair-stepping.
The only edges that can be removed without affecting any important shape after merging are on the top of the mech behind his head, which, if merged and 'de-mirrored', would double three polygons which already use a big portion of texture space; and if the 128 map is too large, unmirroring them would be an even bigger texture space penalty on a smaller map.
I have to check with my friend about how close the camera will get to the mech before I make the decision to downsize the tex map, though. He's told me 128 is the max size for the mech, and although I usually try to be really minimalist with stuff, I'm not sure if a lower map will be able to support the vision I have for it; but of course, if need be, I can start counting my sacrifices and cut it down.