There’s been progress on the spaceship mesh. It might not look like much, but a lot has been going on underneath. I have alerted the community at the Vega Strike forums about my intentions of doing 3D stuff, and have received a cautiously welcoming reception, and a lot of good advice. You can read the tips for spaceship modeling I was given in the second post of this forum.
I am really into the idea of getting some professional grade 3D stuff done for Vega Strike, even if it doesn’t turn out to be my own spaceship designs, and I have already started incorporating their advice into the model I’m making.
To summarise what I think they are saying;-
Point one would be that I should stop worrying about how many polygons the model is made up of. Apparently the sky is the limit, numbers like 150,000 being bandied about for a space station. This is a great relief. I’m sure I had read that the number of polygons had to be kept down, but apparently this relates to old technology and I’m probably showing my age by even mentioning it.
I think the number of polygons has already doubled in my mesh.
Point two is that as many polygons should be rectangular as possible. If possible, every polygon on the model should be a quad. My model had a lot of triangles, but I immediately started turning them into quads. It’s not that tricky, and once you know that this stricture exists it shouldn’t be too much trouble to keep to it. Here we start with two triangles, ready to cause all sorts of problems in the rendering process.
Now they have been deleted and a nice new rectangle is sitting where they once were.
So Like I said, it might not look like much has changed in this render of the spaceship, but a lot is going on beneath the skin.
» Spaceship for Vega Strike, more hard SF
» Great review for the RPG (Heroes in Time)
» The Duelist, Technical stuff to get my art Vega Strike compatible
2 Comments
Hey dude, you probably already know but Alt-J is an awesome tool for making quads out of tris. A lot of cool tools are hard to find in Blender so I thought I’d mention it. :-D
Errr… poly count matters for games that use the polygons directly (as it does for renders or for detail versions that are later used to bake textures for low poly versions, but less), and making quads can cause problems if they are non flat (all vertices in the same plane). After a quick read of the forum, it seems they start with high detail and then later reduce to low poly. Visit some generic game making forums for extra advice. Good luck.