how next gen weapons made?

chrismaddox3d

Im trying to work on my portfolio and want to add some weapons. Though its been a while since i modeled any. Do current games still delete back faces in 1st person and do they still make 2nd low res models for enemy guns? Thanks,Chris

rooster

im no expert but I'm pretty sure in most cases it's yes to both

MoP

If you have CoD4, you can download the "mod tools" package, they have some 3rd and 1st person weapon models in there.
For their firstperson models, the backfaces are mainly heavily optimised rather than deleted. They seem to use the same texture on third and first person weapons, and just use a very optimised version of the firstperson gun.

Eric Chadwick

I would guess they keep backfaces there for shadow casting, whereas old games didn't have shadows to cast so you could simply delete instead of optimize.

Squirmy

for the weapons I have made we just localized the geometry and texture resolution to the player, optimize but dont delete back facing geometry.

rooster

I dont get why, say, underside faces matter? maybe you can't be sure how its going to animate. interesting!

SkyGround

Shooters have 2 models of guns - one for first person view and second for third.

EarthQuake

There really is no reason to delete backfaces anymore, you'll be saving like 500 tris on a scene thats rendering 250,000 onscreen. It really does not matter at all. Now what you should do, is try and place a lot of detail in the areas that will be closest to the camera, and not worry much about areas that are off screen. But deleting backfaces is not something thats needed or even productive at all anymore because it hurts more than it helps(limits animations, etc)

Its usually best to use an optimized version of your FPV model for the world mesh, and use the same texture as well. So try and keep that in mind while you're modeling and uving. What detail can you easily remove without killing your uvs? Its good to try and be aware of that and plan how you'll optimize.

I wrote up a little tutorial that explains some of my uv theory when dealing with FPV meshes and how to bake nice normals as well.

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=53731&page=3