A Noob with Questions
Hello Everyone,
I have recently graduated from a media arts and animation major but it was more for 3d generalists. as in we were taught a little bit of modeling, texturing lighting rigging animation, compositing and stuff but we were not focused in one. So ..jack of everything, master of nothing. I tried to focus on 3d environments which I love.
But this school was on the east coast so it was mostly for visualization. Nothing about creating environments for gaming which is what I want I would love to do. So now I am trying to teach myself how to take my education and optimize it for gaming industry.
But I have a few basic questions that I can't seem to find answers for,
Is it better to model a prop as one single object or can you make the prop out of different object. Let's say I am trying to model a tudor type house like in fable 2. Would I model the whole house as one single object or can I have window trims as separate objects. Or maybe the chimney is a seperate object. because if I were to model this for visualization I would have this house made up of many different objects/meshes. Each floor, windows, beams etc.
But when you do that for games... you would need to get rid of faces that can't be seen and you might end up having stacking polygons or polygons that go through each other. Is that a big no no for games? and if you do have different meshes that make up one prop, it would also mean different texture maps. And the number of texture maps would result in the usage of more memory. Am I right?
So how would you go around modeling something like this:
I hope you guys can clear some of the confusion I have, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks
I have recently graduated from a media arts and animation major but it was more for 3d generalists. as in we were taught a little bit of modeling, texturing lighting rigging animation, compositing and stuff but we were not focused in one. So ..jack of everything, master of nothing. I tried to focus on 3d environments which I love.
But this school was on the east coast so it was mostly for visualization. Nothing about creating environments for gaming which is what I want I would love to do. So now I am trying to teach myself how to take my education and optimize it for gaming industry.
But I have a few basic questions that I can't seem to find answers for,
Is it better to model a prop as one single object or can you make the prop out of different object. Let's say I am trying to model a tudor type house like in fable 2. Would I model the whole house as one single object or can I have window trims as separate objects. Or maybe the chimney is a seperate object. because if I were to model this for visualization I would have this house made up of many different objects/meshes. Each floor, windows, beams etc.
But when you do that for games... you would need to get rid of faces that can't be seen and you might end up having stacking polygons or polygons that go through each other. Is that a big no no for games? and if you do have different meshes that make up one prop, it would also mean different texture maps. And the number of texture maps would result in the usage of more memory. Am I right?
So how would you go around modeling something like this:
I hope you guys can clear some of the confusion I have, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks
Replies
Well, personally, I'd try to keep it to one object if you can. But if you need to, say, animate it inside of UDK with the help of kismet, then multiple objects might be a better idea. Like, you have one mesh for the frame, and one mesh for the door. And when triggered inside udk, the door mesh will rotate, while leaving the frame behind where it should be.
You can model props and houses in multiple parts, but unless it's modular it'd just be more hassle than it's worth. In fact, I don't really see a point with it.
Not at all, I delete back-faces, have floating elements and intersecting pieces on almost every single model I make tbh. It can cause some problems with shadow casting however.
Take for example the 'container' for a truck I modeled once. Only the rear part of it was showing around the corner of a building, so adding a front would be pointless. The backside and top wouldn't be visible either. Had I however deleted the back-faces of the container, the shadows on the ground might have come out kind of weird, especially if the light came from the other side. So I added in some simple faces there without giving them any texture space.
Another example is smaller floating bits on your meshes that have their back-faces deleted, their shadows may come out kind of weird, and occasionally disappear completely in some engines, but normally, it's really not any trouble at all, so delete them first, and if it looks odd, just quickly add them in.
Note however that some older engines, like, quake II kind of old or something may not like it if your mesh isn't air-tight though.
You're both right and wrong there. Usually, more texture maps would mean a bigger performance drain, yes. But you don't necessarily need one texture for each object.
In 3ds max for example, once you finished your models, and still having them seperate, select all of them and then add a uvw unwrap modifier, that way you can unwrap all of them at once. And when you're done, just export those uv's to a bitmap, texture away, and then add that texture to each object. The downside of this though, is that if only one part is shown in the game, it still has to load the whole texture into memory. So this should preferably only be done if all parts are shown together or in roughly the same place.
The same thing can be done in reverse with material channels. Say for example that you have a building that uses multiple tiling materials, but you want the building to be one big mesh. Then you can create a multi-sub object material in max, if that's what you use.
So here, I got a box, which is one mesh. I have a multi material, containing two sub materials. A standard material with a red colour, and a standard one with a white colour.
If I assign the material to the box, it'll turn completely white, only using the first material. But if you go into editable poly, and select the faces which should have the second material, and then scroll down to the material id menu, and give them a material id of 2:
then the faces which have a mat id value 2, will use the sub-material with the id 2. Giving you a box, which is one mesh, with multiple materials.
You can also just select polygons and add materials directly to them. But there's one reason why you shouldn't do this, if you plan on exporting it to an engine.
I mainly use UDK and don't know how mat id's work in other engines, but if you were to export this mesh and import it into udk, then it'd have multiple material channels. Which would be, one channel for each material id you specified in max. This won't work unless you plugged an actual texture into your submaterial in max however.
I would probably, if no specific requirements were to be met, model the whole thing as one big mesh. Then use tilable submaterials to texture it. Like, one texture with tilable roof shingles, one tilable plaster material, one material with tilable wood beams, and then lastly, a misc texture containing things like the windows, signs, a door, or whatever you want to throw in there.
And with that, I hope I'm making any sense. A bit tired and weren't planning on writing this much to begin with
Cheers
yeah for for that and also for easier texture applying. But I guess like you said, I can have them separate in my 3d program and just attach it all together before exporting it into a game engine.
Hmmm I should try this.
what do you mean by "actual texture"
Ah, sorry, weren't completely clear there. What I meant was, that unless you have texture maps plugged into the material, it won't include that material in the export. So gotta have a diffuse in there
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76190
^^A wealth of information regarding your questions...
OMG this is awesome. thanks a lot.
Grimm-Wrecking-- yeah. I was looking through those pages. I just felt like I was confused a litte about the basics before I can dive into more complex stuff. Thanks though, now I will get to reading that.