Here's a general overview of where this is all going. Made a layout of all the major landmarks in maya and threw it into Marmoset for a preview. the second shot is to see if the "verticality" I had in mind works \\
I started with a short, 24-sided cylinder and created one segment from it. then copied it a couple of times, welded the vertices and Path-Deformed the hell out of it and added Turbosmooth. Here's a wire.
Ty again for the feedback! I'll go back and work through these changes and try to look at the silhouettes/gestures again. I really like the Rythmn of wide and narrow and the vertical line techniques.
That model has awful optimization. I have no doubt you could make the poly count 1/3 of what it is now by merging faces and welding vertices. Overall, it looks decent.
So here is my batch with the help of Blender : http://www.froyok.fr/blog/2013-04-fbx-exporter-for-udk-static-meshes-maya-to-blender-fix It fix the vertices count problem :
Just make a plane, rotate it so its vertical and apply a material with the image on it. Then scale it to fit the correct proportions :) For transparency if you select the object and hit alt+x it will make it transparent.
Yes, so your mesh has normal issues in the first place, make sure all your vertices are correctly welded and your edges are smoothed properly coming out of Maya.
Really cool! How did you do the movement on the ground? Is it UV-Distortion of your smoke texture/mask or do you change the vertices of the particles? Or is it another layer on top of everything?
If you are making them for a game and so happen to be using dxt1 as your compression algo, might be worth making sure most of the wrinkles end up horizontal in the texture instead of vertical.