Holes on my object
Greetings, I want to build a wooden shack with some of the wooden planks missing or have a gap in between so u can see inside of it. I thought about just modeling that way or even adding some alphas to the textures but i'm not sure how well that will work. Any hints?
I'm using 3ds max
I'm using 3ds max
Replies
If this is going to be exported to a game engine, it really depends on a lot of things.
How close are you going to get to it?
What kind of budget does the whole scene have?
What is this objects prominence in the scene?
What angles are these boards going to be viewed at?
What kind of texture budget is there?
Probably half a dozen other questions depending on the engine and the type of game.
Boards have thickness and opacity mapped planes do not, so it could look pretty odd at certain angles.
The Edges of opacity maps are highly susceptible to resolution problems. You have to keep in mind if your textures are going to be mip mapped (down sized, compressed and blurred) or not and how that will effect the edges of the boards.
Geometry as simple as a board hardly ever looses the silhouette when it gets crunched.
Also depending on the light setup in the engine it could have trouble rendering through the opacity map also and might cause the whole plane to render a shadow, or eat up more resources figuring that out then it would normal geometry.
If you do go opacity mapped planes, make sure whatever engine you stick them in, they're set to alpha test not alpha sort. I think 3dsmax only does opacity sorting not testing, so it take the long way around every time you render.
not sure about unreal 2004 but certainly with modern engines (ie unreal 3, in this case) it's sometimes best to model details that used to be alpha'd. It'll just cause you less problems in the long run.
Does depend on size of hole and prominence, though.