That specific example seems a bit excessive to me, but I can't think of a reason why you shouldn't ever do it like that. Especially if it's going to be used in narrow corridors anyway, where not much geo will be rendered at any given time. In Elite we have spaceships that use support loops that are well over 200k tris.
tynew - You simply need a proper low or call it "med poly" topology and edgeflow. You don't need any highpoly if you can make proper "med poly" meshes. Chamfers are pain to uv because you can't break them in the corners, because you don't have an edge there. Also, its very hadrd to LOD properly and efficiently, it will…
Just wondering does anyone know a fast way to assign normals by hand in max? Without using scripts it looks like I have to select individual faces one by one to choose what I want to average which seems tedious... I can't seem to use face to face/edge loop tools for quick selection.
Yeah loops are so much easier to lod. Thanks for the images! I have one question. Wouldn't it worth to simply normalmap those small holes on the left side, instead of modeling them? You know you can combine this these techniques with normalmapped details, and sometimes you can save a lot of geo with doing this. You are…
Sorry for the delay... @Artist_in_a_box - I would say they are done with FWVN. Use one or the another technique. Personally I prefer to use FWVN because it gives you better silhouette, because you are actually rounding the corners, plus it gives you the nice edge shading. Support loops gives you only nice edge shading, but…
Actually I was going to use only geometry and vertex colours; no UV's/textures for something different and a little bit stylised, but now I'm thinking it could be cool to compare various styles. Currently the only area that suffers from this choice is the grip; it'd cost a lot of geometry to get the diamond pattern on…
Having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around this and was hoping I could get some help. I did these two tests. With the cube, I didn't have to edit any vertex normals. I just beveled all the edges and it came out looking like the image in the first post of this thread. For the other mesh I just added support loops. It…
Everyone who has tried existing FWN scripts probably knows this small problem: To fix it in 3ds, you just add another Edit Normals modifier into the stack, select the offending faces and use Edit Normals -> Average -> Selected command. But what if we automate that too, with a way to exclude chamfer face influence? End…
Not a terribly useful reply, but a chamfered cube still needs UVs and those introduce splits, so depending on how you map it approaches 40 verts. As for performance, I have heard the thing about thin triangles, back in the day it was an issue for vertex lighting, nowadays it can be an issue for quad overshading…
"At a glance you can't really tell the difference between the 'medpoly' and the sub-d mesh which is a good sign." Medpoly. Yeah this is how I also call them. And yeah, Its hard to tell the difference sometimes. Well, Personally I can see it now sometimes, but that happens only in the case of loops. Bevels can still fool…