FB and Mobile Models for Sprites
polycounter lvl 5
Hey guys, since this is my first post on PolyCount, I figured I'd give a little background stuff. My name's Austin Chalk and at the moment I'm interested in doing 3D Environment work for FB and mobile stuff like games from Backflip Studios and Kabam. Right now I'm working on a couple of models and sprites like this raider hut thing. I have some lights on it because I'm fixing some of the UVs and getting it ready to bake the AO. As far as 3D work in general I've barely scratched the surface compared to most of the gurus on the forum but please pick my stuff apart and offer any suggestions!
Replies
1.) structure your posts a bit better, you text is currently a wall, a bit hard to read for the quick browser (which could be the difference between a contextual crit)
2.) reference, if your modeling something we need to know what it is, more to the point you need to know what it is, a design or reference picture is always something good to base your model off and it helps us crit it via giving use somehtign to compare it with.
3.) polycount, its always nice to know what your current tri-count is, it makes it easier to assess your efficiency and how suiting the model is to your needs.
in any case welcome to polycount, I've mostly been lurking but the threads I have had up I've improved a lot from, in modeling, texturing and animating, if your looking for a place to learn, take the crits as crits and not as hate, and once again, welcome.
1) A couple of my references were just more inspiration than anything. But in terms of some of the visual elements and future textures this is what I was/am going for:
Always dug the torture cages from Oblivion
The spikes on the top I actually got from Tusken Raiders
For textures I was kind of looking for a mud/clay look like this
2) My tri count right now is sitting around 13,000 so definitely need to clean that up. Any suggestions or reading on how to approach lowering poly count?
Thanks again for the response!
My general suggestion for lowering polycount is: look where most of your polygons are. That's likely where you can remove the most.
- use a small tiling texture. In which case you need to unwrap the link like a bent cylinder-> making a perfect rectangle in the UV. You could then offset the whole texture to move the details around to different places on the links.
- use a large texture and paint several variations to breaks thing up a bit, and you could make a second row for the smaller links (to keep texel size the same).
Ofcourse, flip/mirror/rotate chains to break things up even more. personally, I'd choose the latter, as you can choose to make only two rows and fill the remaining 75% of the texture with other props, and it's a more straightforward method.
Your polycount... depends. I know that's a useless answer, but you've not given us a whole lot of info. And those companies you mentioned seem to only do 2D stuff.
Facebook/mobile means triangles than PC/console obviously, but there's still a lot of things that influence the budget. An RTS for example needs many tiny buildings, and you know quite accurately how large they will be displayed on screen - while a FPS lets you walk right up to the walls but shows less buildings at once.
For some reason this gives me a bit of a Diablo/Warcraft vibe, plus that one company does farmville-esque stuff so I'm gonna assume it's for a top-down iPad game. In which case I'd say... stay under 1000 triangles. So, uh, yeah. Kind of over budget right now, if that's your goal.
Maybe it's best to just stick to getting it under 10k as a nice round number, and aim for mobile-spec for your next project.
Wanted to see it in silhouette just to see the overall gesture of it:
And finally, the tri counts down to about 10,100
Also, I feel like there should be something above the fur covers to break up all the empty space, especially the top one.
Is this just a bug? It looks fine in the render but it's kind of annoying to look at/work with :P