I was planning on creating an alien environment a little while back but I had some issues with the Torque engine and alpha sorting and I kind of gave up on it. I'm starting over, here's an alien tree that I whipped up today, 768 polygons with a 1024x1024 texture
Thanks, @Swordslayer! Yeah, that totally worked! For #3, another artist also suggested using the Create tool (which I have never tried before), while in the polygon mode of the Edit Poly/Editable Poly, which worked too!
Nope, not automatically at least. You'll have to first hide the half of the mesh you don't want to select, and then work from there. Temporary polygroups can help, as you'll be able to make polygroups based on which polygons are visible.
Just flatten those tiny polygons. This will make the vertexnormals facing upwards, and this should completely solve the shading artifacts, because its coming from them. It works pretty much the same, as it would with a simple phong shading.
Can you make two different low polys, one that you bake off (with fixed edges and so forth) and then one that you apply the normal map to that is lower polygons with hard edges. Would that work? :P
I like the way you've redesigned the back part of the vehicle. I think you could have used some more polygons on the front arms, they're very sharp and could benefit from some bevels.
It's probably because your object is being vertex lit. If you give the ground there a second UV channel and put a lightmap on it you'll get smoother lighting. Or you could subdivide the ground a bit to give it smaller polygons.
Hi. How about using the interactive creation setting under Create>Polygon Primitives. If you want to snap it to a face,edge or point, the regular snapping options in Maya works. For instance creating a Cube on top of a sphere.
rendering is just to fast these days. i used to be able to go for a walk, but ever since i built a modern rig it just chews through everything in minutes (unless its a several milion polygon zbrush sculpt)
@Rhinokey - Hey There...it's 1.572 mil polygons...Furthermore, we can clearly see things are coming quite sharp and crisp in the middle with the current subdiv level.As we move away from center the quality starts to deteorate.