Hum after a closer look the legs don't look like they'd actually work. I mean the pneumatics there are useless, the legs would break if they were ever pulled back in. Exactly something ikea would sell... like Kl├â┬Ñppst├â┬©hl. :P
The turret itself is cool though...
Contest: Defensive Structure
Moderators: MR.D, Moderators
OK, I know this is prob to... not high poli looking (but somehow I have used quite a few, prob due to lack of knowledge on what I can get rid of on a moddel like this...) However I just though this would be a neat Idea that would fit nanoblobs quite well...
The Animation explanes how it works better than I can in words...
PS the guns are pretty crap but liek i said this is more an idea... besides its not textured, lots of things look crap without a texture...
aGorm
The Animation explanes how it works better than I can in words...
PS the guns are pretty crap but liek i said this is more an idea... besides its not textured, lots of things look crap without a texture...
aGorm
Thanks!! Was kinda think trap door spiders and such when i came into my head...
If this ever got in game (or somthing like it) It would be pretty cool if not all the legs worked at teh same moment in time, so it kinda hooks over two legs, scrambles up with the 3rd and then stabalises with teh 4th or somthing... its a little too neat in teh way i have showen it!
aGorm
If this ever got in game (or somthing like it) It would be pretty cool if not all the legs worked at teh same moment in time, so it kinda hooks over two legs, scrambles up with the 3rd and then stabalises with teh 4th or somthing... its a little too neat in teh way i have showen it!
aGorm
-
Warlord Zsinj
- Imperial Winter Developer
- Posts: 3742
- Joined: 24 Aug 2004, 08:59
I'll attempt the uvmapping and post the model later this week.
This is a crappily made animation of it opening.
1506 tris...Might change if I attempt to de-uglify the barrel, but ugliness might add to its fearsomeness once it's textured...hard to tell as of now.
Oh and it's got 13 moving pieces. I'm not sure how forward kinematics works, but I think it will be fairly easy to script this.
This is a crappily made animation of it opening.
1506 tris...Might change if I attempt to de-uglify the barrel, but ugliness might add to its fearsomeness once it's textured...hard to tell as of now.
Oh and it's got 13 moving pieces. I'm not sure how forward kinematics works, but I think it will be fairly easy to script this.
I dont even know what welding is yet.
It looks cool man! But I cant realy give you technical help, cause I'm not that good at moddeling in teh first place...
I've been thinking on mine, and I relised tehres a load of wasted polies on teh legs that you'd never see in a million years... I'm gonna fix that tonight and hopefully it will free up enough to beef up teh gun and add some bolts through the joints.
aGorm
I've been thinking on mine, and I relised tehres a load of wasted polies on teh legs that you'd never see in a million years... I'm gonna fix that tonight and hopefully it will free up enough to beef up teh gun and add some bolts through the joints.
aGorm
Is it possible to add more than 1 gun in your mod Argh?
What i mean is: You select a sheep(for example) and order it to build this Uber Gun. The Sheep then builds 1 of 3(for example) models of Uber Gun.
which will all have same DPS and Range, but different projectiles.
Just an idea, don`t blame me :) So we can see more cool designs ingame. Sorry for offtopic.
What i mean is: You select a sheep(for example) and order it to build this Uber Gun. The Sheep then builds 1 of 3(for example) models of Uber Gun.
which will all have same DPS and Range, but different projectiles.
Just an idea, don`t blame me :) So we can see more cool designs ingame. Sorry for offtopic.
Warlord Zsinj wrote:I was sort of expecting a giant barrel to slide out of the middle and slot into those two things that appear to actually be the barrels. They seem a little dimunitive for the drama of the opening up process.
That is the exact same thought I had. I think a huge barrel that parascopes out would be really nice. It could be small enough to fit inside at first and then extend out. Example (Note: It should extend a bit farther: The each section of extending barrel should only get a tiny amount smaller than the previous section: unlike the example where they go from norml to medium to tiny):
I think that would be a really cool unit! It could even be some kind of large range wepaon.
-
LathanStanley
- Posts: 1429
- Joined: 20 Jun 2005, 05:16
@aGorm/Everybody:
Welding is, basically, the process of eliminating un-needed vertices from a model, for maximum efficiency while rendering.
Any 3D model consists of 3 or more points in space, which form the corners of the polygon. These corners are known as vertices.
When two or more vertices meet in space, it is more efficient to simply combine them into one point, thus saving the amount of XYZ data being stored, sorted, and then sent to the rendering pipeline. This is what welding essentially does.
However, due to the nature of rasterizing rendering, welding has other benefits. Good welding can give a model's "rounded" areas a much more rounded look within a 3D engine, because the engine can average things like light sources across multiple polygons that form the welded mesh. This gives things a smoother appearance than would normally be the case- after all, unless a mesh's resolution is so fine that one face < one pixel, it's essentially a collection of flat planes in space.
Welding can cause serious problems, however, if your models aren't carefully made. When the vertices are welded together, they may form surfaces with "bad" vertices. These are vertices where one or more n-gons (the formal term for a polygon of n-vertices) formed by them results in a surface that is not valid- i.e., it is concave, or twisted.
This causes rendering problems. When the rasterizer goes through the model and hits bad vertices, it may even fail entirely, because it cannot evaluate the geometry. Usually, though, it just causes really horrible-looking dark smears on the model, caused by the renderer being unable to determine which side of the polygon is "out".
To prevent these problems in low-poly mesh modeling, follow some basic rules of thumb:
1. If you can model it with discrete, sharp edges and then weld instead of modeling with mushy curves, do so.
2. Model using booleans and lofting whenever possible. Avoid direct editing of the mesh unless you are sure what you are doing, and always look very critically at the results. It's very easy to create badly-welded models, for example, by modeling a mesh at X size, then scaling it later on. If you're going to scale, do it early, before you're turning the pieces. If you have to get something perfectly fitted at an odd angle... do a test, write down the scalar values used, then do it again with the model in rest position. I have stressed modeling in rest position before, but this is yet another reason to do so!
Those of you using Wings are in a somewhat-bad fix. You don't really have super-good boolean tools, and based on my attempts to work with it, it's not exactly a super tool for doing scalar work with.
However, there are ways around its problems. Several software tools exist for working with meshes and fixing the flaws- including UVMapper Pro, which is what I use. You can, for example, completely unweld a model in UVMapper Pro by using the Split By Angle feature, and giving it a split angle of 179.9999 degrees, which will effectively un-weld the entire model by forcing all non-planar polygons to have discrete vertices. There are other tools out there that can do these things as well (yes, some of them are free, although I don't really recommend them).
To see, a lot more clearly, what welding problems look like, see this sterling example shot:
As you can see, this model has a very serious welding flaw. That back triangle on the "house" is black because it and the other triangle that form the "wall" were welded together, and the back verts, which were welded to the "roof", etc. apparantly twisted the face. I tried un-welding this in Rhino3D (my primary modeler) and it didn't work. I could've split it all out in UVMapper Pro, but quite frankly, if I have to do that much work to save geometry that would take me 3 minutes to make myself in Rhino, I don't bother
Welding is, basically, the process of eliminating un-needed vertices from a model, for maximum efficiency while rendering.
Any 3D model consists of 3 or more points in space, which form the corners of the polygon. These corners are known as vertices.
When two or more vertices meet in space, it is more efficient to simply combine them into one point, thus saving the amount of XYZ data being stored, sorted, and then sent to the rendering pipeline. This is what welding essentially does.
However, due to the nature of rasterizing rendering, welding has other benefits. Good welding can give a model's "rounded" areas a much more rounded look within a 3D engine, because the engine can average things like light sources across multiple polygons that form the welded mesh. This gives things a smoother appearance than would normally be the case- after all, unless a mesh's resolution is so fine that one face < one pixel, it's essentially a collection of flat planes in space.
Welding can cause serious problems, however, if your models aren't carefully made. When the vertices are welded together, they may form surfaces with "bad" vertices. These are vertices where one or more n-gons (the formal term for a polygon of n-vertices) formed by them results in a surface that is not valid- i.e., it is concave, or twisted.
This causes rendering problems. When the rasterizer goes through the model and hits bad vertices, it may even fail entirely, because it cannot evaluate the geometry. Usually, though, it just causes really horrible-looking dark smears on the model, caused by the renderer being unable to determine which side of the polygon is "out".
To prevent these problems in low-poly mesh modeling, follow some basic rules of thumb:
1. If you can model it with discrete, sharp edges and then weld instead of modeling with mushy curves, do so.
2. Model using booleans and lofting whenever possible. Avoid direct editing of the mesh unless you are sure what you are doing, and always look very critically at the results. It's very easy to create badly-welded models, for example, by modeling a mesh at X size, then scaling it later on. If you're going to scale, do it early, before you're turning the pieces. If you have to get something perfectly fitted at an odd angle... do a test, write down the scalar values used, then do it again with the model in rest position. I have stressed modeling in rest position before, but this is yet another reason to do so!
Those of you using Wings are in a somewhat-bad fix. You don't really have super-good boolean tools, and based on my attempts to work with it, it's not exactly a super tool for doing scalar work with.
However, there are ways around its problems. Several software tools exist for working with meshes and fixing the flaws- including UVMapper Pro, which is what I use. You can, for example, completely unweld a model in UVMapper Pro by using the Split By Angle feature, and giving it a split angle of 179.9999 degrees, which will effectively un-weld the entire model by forcing all non-planar polygons to have discrete vertices. There are other tools out there that can do these things as well (yes, some of them are free, although I don't really recommend them).
To see, a lot more clearly, what welding problems look like, see this sterling example shot:
As you can see, this model has a very serious welding flaw. That back triangle on the "house" is black because it and the other triangle that form the "wall" were welded together, and the back verts, which were welded to the "roof", etc. apparantly twisted the face. I tried un-welding this in Rhino3D (my primary modeler) and it didn't work. I could've split it all out in UVMapper Pro, but quite frankly, if I have to do that much work to save geometry that would take me 3 minutes to make myself in Rhino, I don't bother