For the last 4-5 months I have been remodeling every TA and AA unit in ultra-high detail. I have set a minimum of 1500 triangles per unit. Yes, that's ridiculously high. Point and laugh. The objective is to have all of them done and textured within another 8-12 months.

In addition to some random models I've just done on impulse, I have largely completed all the L1 units (of every kind), all the factories for every type of unit, and most other structures.

Thus far, I have largely completed 62 models. Here are two which I am very satisfied with, though I may still tweak them a little. I am not posting the rest of them for a bit. Frankly I'm too lazy to take that many screenshots... and some of them are missing an arm or a leg still...

Core "Thud"


Core "Storm"


In order to make the texturing process a little easier on me, I'd like it if any volunteers for making metal textures would PM me. It'll be a while yet before I'm to the texturing stage, but I'm working on a way to make the process very quick while still maintaining quality. Also, any relevant texturing tutorials that you think would be helpful would be appreciated... I'm still very new at this texturing thing!

Because of the modular way that AA is set up, these will not be a forced download. You can still use the low-detail models if you choose, by just not downloading the "High Definition Pack". These will be a part of RealOTA eventually, as well. Filesize is not going to be a consideration. I'm expecting the main content file to be at least 80 MB, with patches and unit descriptors, etc, etc, being much smaller... 1MB or so at most.

Now, onto the question everyone's going epileptic over: Will my computer be able to run it? There's a complicated answer, but the simple on is, probably. In my experience, what kills performance is NOT polygon count (model detail), but the other functions of the spring engine, such as LoS calculations and pathfinding. There is an effective limit of about 500 mobile units for the average computer, since beyond that, your CPU just won't be able to handle all these calculations and will degrade gameplay severely.

So: if you can run Spring now, you can most probably run Spring HD with no noticable decrease in performance unless shadows and reflectivity are turned on. Reflectivity won't be too bad, maybe causing a 25-40% drop in performance compared to what you're used to. Shadows will probably cause an additional 25-40% drop.

Looks pretty good Caydr!

Technical Development shows that there are no ridicolous amounts of Polygons, just Years to wait for the fitting Graphic Cards...

Looks really really good. But you bring us into Trouble Cadyr, the better Spring looks and plays, the more we will get into the Eyes of Big Companys... and there Lawyers.

Thats some old Textures - maybee you can use them. I once tried to render a -forget it ...

Those are sick-awsome Caydr. Now I have to make sure my next computer can run three specific things... SupCom, Infinity, and this.

Babylon 5?

Looks really impressive.

Keep in mind that Spring uses smooth shading unless you break the edges up (separate UV chunks or simply separation on the mesh).

No- more TA Stuff, some Things with SystemShock and so on.. most of it was crap, beside the Textures.. i had Problems skinning with the Bone System... back to Topic - This will rock

so you don't want volunteers for doing the actual skins then?

not to seem nitpicking here, but storm is a core kbot, and core uses pure robots (peoples brains patterned into robots and reproduced over and over again) given that limited but very precise background fluff for TA (which AA is very heavily based on) Why does the storm have windows.. no one drives it.. hence no one needs to see out of it.. maybe eyes.. but not windows.. its got a full on mech cockpit it seems and it just doesnt make sense..

Caydr, some of those barrels can have like, half of the polies killed without any decrease in the way it looks...

But, not bad..

XD

Maybe Caydr can just drop the TA background story?
It would be better for several reasons.

EDIT: This is a response on Fanger's post.

Shhh, before he decides to remodel the core range.....

More seriously this is going to kick major ass, anoither damn fine job Caydr

**probably doesn't matter and i bet he doesn't care

**i don't know for sure!

edit: i'd say he'd be better off removing the extra pollies on the corners that you can't barely see on those screenies

I don't care if I'm wasting a few polys here and there TBH. I'm just going for a total triangle count between 1500 and 2000 on every unit, with exceptions for extremely large and extremely small ones. I could probably halve that number and still get really nice detail... but I'm just not going to.

If you check the original storm model, it had this sort of shiny metal on the front. I'm going to have a similar texture on its "cockpit" despite there not being a human pilot. Maybe there is sensing equipment in there.... or... uh... something. I don't know. That's just the way the original looked... quite a few Core units have glass textures when logically there'd be no reason for glass.

Wow, neat stuff there! Had a feeling you were doing that If you want detailed critique or help rebuilding specific things to cut down polycount, lemme know.

I think the TA storyline as made after the TA units were created and they wanted a GUI.

1500 tris? Hmm, calling that 700-800 polys (quads, tri, f-gons)... that's quite high. But not ridiculous, really. Stupidly high, considering the scale of those units, maybe, but not ricidulous; it's easy enough to get that high and have to simplify down again. Going for a fixed tri count without being sensible with the use of those tris also wastes a lot of faces in pointless places - if you're putting that much effort in, a tiny bit more in sensible face use isn't a lot.

Really is unnecessary for in-game use, I'd say, unless people make excessive use of the first-person view - and even then. Might make some beautiful out-of-game renders though. Virtually none of that detail will ever be visible, and most of it would be better done in textures than modelling. Even for pretty renders. It might have little effect on game performance, but it's definitely effort wasted...

On the other hand, if it's what you want to do, nobody's stopping you. I just feel it's wasted effort as far as Spring goes. And almost certainly SupCom too.

In relation to the two images:
That thud doesn't look tough enough to me. Especially the feet; all that detail there makes it look like all the functional parts are unprotected. The barrels look too thin too. And the "head" area - that flat front looks like it's just been chopped off, as does the back from this angle.

The window frames (whatever they are supposed to be, that's what they look like - and windows are highly impractical on a futuristic armoured machine, in my book) look wrong, on the Storm. From that angle the rocket pods look as though they're very high above the main body, and seems as if they could be hovering above. The whole rocket pod section looks entirely different to the rest; it's too plain if you're going for that level of excessive detail.The Storm's legs and feet at least look sufficiently tough and armoured. The model would be mostly fine if you stripped off the windowframes and did something else appropriate with the head.

The Storm's OK mostly; the Thud just looks wrong.
(Willing to provide similar criticism for any more images until I get bored of doing so!)

If you even attempt to use 3do-style texturing for such units you are so far out of your mind that you've probably gone back through complete sanity a dozen times and still ended up in completely insane. I really hope that isn't the case! UV mapping complex models saves a lot of time in most cases, and is also much easier to change textures.

How are you intending to release the models? Simply as finished, textured s3os in the final product, or are you intending to release the separate skins and objects? I would highly recommend the latter; a project like this would be wasted if the material wasn't available to others to fiddle with.

I've already demonstrated 10 times over that some excessive detail here and there doesn't impact anything in Spring. What slows it down is the LoS and pathfinding. I can probably dig up the thread where I prove this undeniably with ingame screens.

Yes, I'm UV mapping.

I model these units with the originals side-by-side, and they are proportionately identical. The Thud's barrels are a bit skinny compared with the original ones, I agree. (edit: fixed that, see pics below)

You can't see the 3D view so I can understand why you'd think the thud doesn't look well-armored. But it definitely looks like a rough fighting unit. All the areas I'd say are critical are protected by double-layered thick metal. I'll try and take some pics for you to see. As for the flat front on the cockpit, I think it looks stylish or unique or something like that. Looks different, but not in a bad way.

~~~

Pics:

Wow, those are pretty ugly. Definately not how I saw them. Do you have any others done?