Low Poly Modeling Techniques
polycounter lvl 7
I have a mesh all done and unwrapped in 3DS Max, and right now I have a couple of hangups with it. One, It's a character model that is supposed to have a large variety of gear he can wear. While most of it can be done with texture swaps, I'm having problems in two places: Shirt shoulders and the parts of gloves that extrude from the body. Right now they exist as separate meshes that line up perfectly at the borders where they meet the body's topology, but that prevents them from existing in the same smoothing group as the body since they are a different piece and not attached. I don't want to have four different meshes, one with shoulders, one with gloves, one with shoulders and gloves, and one last one with neither, what is the best way to do this for a character model? Concidering I might have many more attachments, it would be impossible to model every single possible combination of parts.
Second issue is my texture is 128x128, which looks great and all except when I render it for some reason 3DS Max decides to blur out where pixels meet, completely ruining the 8bit look. How do I keep 3DS from rendering my textures in this way?
Second issue is my texture is 128x128, which looks great and all except when I render it for some reason 3DS Max decides to blur out where pixels meet, completely ruining the 8bit look. How do I keep 3DS from rendering my textures in this way?
Replies
B.) disable map filtering in the render settings (F10 > Renderer > Antialiasing > Filter Maps = uncheck)
First three is him with the shoulders and gloves, the shoulders and gloves transparent, and lastly with them hovering over the mesh. Bottom left is the UVs that I'm probably going to be laying out after studying sama.van's work extensively, as their style is the way I was hoping this model would look, next to it is a quick doodle I threw it on it so you'd know what corresponded to what in the UVs, and lastly is a render showing how the detached shoulder pieces don't smooth with the rest of the mesh.
What would be the best way to model an RPG character that needs to be as low poly as feasable, but still having a large variety of gear that it can wear that changes it's mesh?
EDIT: Oh, and just the straight up single mesh is 436 polygons/856 tris which I am probably going to have to cut down, just wondering what kind of effect that will do to any of it's future animations, with the shoulders and gloves it comes out at 506 polygons. UV'ing is my least favorite part though, and I'm not intirely sure how the face overlay works, so I'll probably have to look up some tutorials.