Interesting that you site those titles as the modding mainstay, I automatically think of Quake & Quake 2 as the pinnacle and it went downhill from there... and I'm sure someone else would correct me and say the Doom PWAD days were the golden era. so as mankind has been saying since the dawn of civilization "shit sux, it…
Next-gen characters alone can have a 10k-20k tricount, so you are well within limits. For games like Crysis or Gears, there can be 2-3 milion polygons on-screen at times, so I think you're fine ;D. If you're new to UDK, I recommend you take a look at Chris Albeluhn's tutorials.
Most importantly, set the amount of 'Instances Per Cluster' to a power of 2 value and increase the cluster radius until it won't affect the cluster count. Otherwise lightmap memory gets wasted which also increases build times. With large amounts of foliage you should be really careful about your lightmap resolutions and…
Or you could do something related but different. Atm I'm painting some concept art and it's 1. going pretty well considering I haven't really done this kinda thing apart from simple concepts and 2. something that I'm putting loads of hours into, more so than I would do modelling or sculpting at this moment in time.
I just picked up [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Guide-Vehicles-Vessels-Star/dp/0345449029/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312323144&sr=1-2"]this[/ame] at Barnes and Noble in the bargain bin yesterday. How ironic. It's got front, side, and perspective views of ALL TEH SHIPS. It's badass.
because those verts are not assigned to something else assign them to calf bone give them 0.1 then select the thigh bone and change the weithing to zero. the 0.1 weight will change to 1.0 Voila ;) Max is simply preventing you from having unassigned verts. You're trying to assign a 0 weight on 2 verts that are only assigned…
Rendering the wireframes as isoline will let you keep the smoothing at 2 and have recognizable topology. I also feel the scale on the cracked dirt/concrete is too large, making the cars all look like miniatures. I would love to see all five versions of the cars in a lineup, or something that's not a distant render with…
You have raised a really interesting topic! I can't add something to what has been said already, but i'll drop my obvious 2 cents about it- just do what you like to, don't look how hard or complicated is that- learn and grow over yourself. if you enjoy the process, all problems will be solved with time.
Thanks for the replies. I'll test out the preserve UVs and going to a new editablePoly instead of reverting back to the old one. The main reason I needed this info now though is because this model I'm working on will need 2 or 3 LODs and going back to edit it and having to completely re-UV it each time a new LOD is…
A little bit more, I added 2 more grass variations (not really noticable in this image) and grass planes in 3D. It's quite hard to get the grass planes right. I edited the normals in Max to face directly up and use transparent/cutout shader in Unity but may have to make my own shader, because backfaces are culled. =(