Low poly coffin

Vile

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGXBhgIr1ww[/ame]

Im not entirely sure what a low poly count is and this is around my third or fourth video, 30 minutes to make and render. Videos sped up though, how can i improve this?

http://filebox.me/view/0hd14xs3d

Ben Apuna

Are you looking for a critique on your workflow? or the model itself?

If it's the model just post up some wireframe screen grabs, list the triangle count, tell us what type of game this might be for, and how close the camera would get to it.

If it's a workflow critque that you want, then you are asking for a lot, sorry not going to spend 10 minutes watching you model a coffin.

The best general tip for working faster that I can give would be to use hotkeys. Even better would be to set up some custom hotkeys and scripts for your most commonly used tools and procedures.

EDIT:

Ok so out of plain curiosity and to not be a total asshole I watched your video...

1. Learn to use the 2.5D snaps it's much faster aligning verts that way, rather than copy/pasting values in notepad.

2. Learn to use the connect tool while selecting edge rings, that'll be a lot easier/faster than using the slice tool. (hmm... this might be "while selecting face rings... it's been some time since I've used Max)

3. You would get a more consistent width to the side panels by modeling the overall shape of the coffin, then insetting.

4. You could have gotten the lid shape a lot faster by copying the faces from the bottom of the coffin, or by cutting it off the main shape before you extruded the inside.

5. I personally don't see the point of setting up lights and rendering while you're in the middle of modeling. What you see in the viewport is pretty close to what it would look like in a game engine.

6. From personal experience, coffin models are usually made to hold a character model. It's best to start with a generic scale character in the scene that you can place into the coffin to make sure you've modeled it to the correct scale.

7. Some people like to create a generic max scene that already has a pre-made box with a nice gray material applied to it. If you do a lot of modeling it's a small step that may save you some time in the long run. Sorry I don't remember the specifics of setting this up but a search here on Polycount should yield results.

Hope that helps

Vile

Thanks for the amazing help :]

CharlieD

@Ben Apuna

Just curious what you mean in learning to use 2.5D snaps. What settings do you use to align the verts? This would be very helpful to me. Thanks.

Ben Apuna

The 2.5D snaps are useful to relatively align a vert selection with some other vert outside the selection. Like along a xy, yz, zx plane but not all three axis at once.

1. Turn on 2.5D snap - make sure vertex is checked on in the snapping options, it helps to turn off most of the other snaps as well. I usually just left vertex and pivot on and the rest off.

2. Select the verts you intend to move to the same location as other existing verts in the scene.

3. Switch focus to one of the orthographic viewports.

4. Then drag your verts using the move tool until they snap where you want them to.

The main trick being use the orthographic viewport with the 2.5D snaps and not the perspective viewport. If you're snapping in the perspective viewport you need to use the 3D snaps, but you can't relatively align verts that way.

Now if you're talking about really "aligning" verts like lining them up the only way I know is with the make planar and make planar x, y, and z buttons or by scaling them to a value of 0%.

If you want to copy/paste x,y,z values faster than notepad, I believe I've seen some scripts around here that might help with that, though I can't find them atm, sorry.

Also sorry if I"m a bit off with the instructions, it's been about 1 year since I've used Max at all and the details are getting fuzzy.

CharlieD

Thanks a bunch Ben, that was really helpful.

Baddcog

I don't think 'low poly' can be a certian number of polys per se. The low poly model thread is for models under 500 tris. (there is a difference between tris and polys. Polys can be tris, quads or even 100 tris per poly.) In Max a 'poly' has a visible edge when edged faces is turned on in the viewport.

Typically I think of low polys as around 1,000 tris or less. This tends to be what alot of characters in games 10 years ago had and are thought of as 'last gen', next gen is all the newer stuff that can have 5,000 polys and up per game character.

But that also depends on what the model is. 1,000 tris for a crate would be excessively high poly in most cases.

Probably the best deffinition is 'using the least amount of tris to define the major shapes of an object'. The rest of the details should be painted on. This was really important in old games, and currently very important on I-phone games.