Spring RTS Engine

OK, slightly off subject, but anyways...

Argh, if you are going to make a competition centered around a supplied model that we are not allowed to modify, at least make the model a good one. I'm not talking about looks, with a good texture the model itself can look alright. I'm talking about the technical side of modeling.

Apparently we were not allowed to modify the geometry, but bits of it were not set up very well for UV mapping. for instance, the tail. Everything else is set up for mirroring, yet this one piece had a diagonal across the top preventing you from mirroring it completely. The central rotor was 5 sided, again preventing any mirroring. With an extra 2 polys for another side, you could set it up for mirroring, and save UV space.

Some more examples:
* The rotor blade does not need to be rectangular. the edge is so small that it can hardly be seen at all as it is. A triangular prism works fine here. Same with the landing struts.
* The cylinder thing on top of the rotors was 12 sided. Why? You can easily get away with 8 sided, 6 if you don't mind a little bit of jaggedness.
* You can remove the mirroring on the rotor housing. It is not really needed. It is a small piece in comparison with the rest of the model, so it does not take up much more UV space unmirrored. With the mirroring of the central rotor I mentioned above, you will have UV space to spare anyway.

I was able to shave off 30 polys from the model, without a noticeable drop in quality. The only bit you can notice without VERY close study is the top cylinder thing on the rotors. 30 polys does not sound like much, but when the original model was only 224 polys, 30 polys is almost 15%. That is just unacceptable.

You had obviously removed some hidden faces, but couldn't you finish the job? That count of 224 polys before was after I removed the hidden faces you missed. The total count before removing the ones you missed was 234. Again, a difference of 10 does not sound like much, but when you are doing low poly modeling it counts for a lot.

Come on. If you are going to act all high and mighty, at least do it RIGHT.

There were some cylinder caps which he forgot to hide and personally I'd have used a quad for the rotor blades each.

UV mapping it wasn't difficult, look at my attempt. Tools => Snap To Image is truely awesome.

Go Go GHEYCOPTER!!.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hlw5lHns5Q

It's team color, I swear.

Made some tweaks to the reflection map and the nose... fell almost asleep this morning.

TA view:


Close up:


Really... who said you can't squeeze detail out of small texture maps?

what an ugly mesh

Yes, the model sucks! Made in 20 minutes with Rhino, on 32 hours of not-sleeping (which explains the high-and-mighty bit, although there's really no excuse for making an ass out've myself for the better part of yesterday... meh).

Poorly optimized, as well, the main blades should be four quads, the stabilizer two, and I should have cut some polygons that couldn't be seen. The landing struts should have not cut so far into the body, for easier pre-shading, and the skis could have been two pairs of quads, without losing much, unless it was supposed to be huge in-game.

Moreover, with just a few polygon changes, it could have had better detail with just a small rise in polycount- for example, the cockpit could have been a pair of triangles floating slightly above the fuselage, the engine details and other stuff could have been done with some quads.

However, the point of the contest was to demonstrate that you can, indeed, get fairly decent results if you want to, out've a very small skin, by playing with detail levels.

I learned useful stuff, from going to the extreme- for example, the only way to get that much detail on the body was to mirror and split it up, and even with saving uv space by using a planar projection instead of unfolding, it was tricky to hide the distortion.

Moreover... once you've completed a uvmap, you can always fix the mesh. Here's the same heli, with every spare face cut, all blades reduced to minimum tricount, etc. 172 tris. All uvmapped, if you just want to try painting mini-scale. Try apply my skin to it- still works

I'd like to see Rattle's final texture and uvmap, then since the rest of you were, apparently, too wimpy to give it a go, I'll compare the two. I really wanna see what his strat was, on the body.

Zpock wrote:
Go Go GHEYCOPTER!!.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hlw5lHns5Q

lulz for hours and hours and hours.

You made my day

very nice arg, can we see the uvmap? well i geuss when this is all good and done?

Oh, the links take you to the model, in final .S3O format, etc. The last link takes to the model after being optimized (at least, I'm pretty sure I didn't miss any tris, except maybe on the top of the tail, but meh).

Yeah I'm done.

Texture with team color applied...

... and without.


Models/textures here. Same URL basically.

Now that I've seen it, the only quibbles I have is with the use of the reflective map- I think that it would've been cooler if the nose wasn't so shiny, it detracts from the cockpit. Also, a blackline for the cockpit's lowest piece of "glass" would have made it pop out better.

And I think that you could've gained more space by lowering the space given to the underside, which, as a heli, you'd rarely see.

Minor quibbles, though. Good work, and it certainly looks all right, at any distance. I'm tempted to go ahead and optimize the model, then make a mini-mod- "F'n Ugly Heli Warz"

Maybe we should do another contest, then we can have "F'n Ugly Heli and Tank Warz". Although I should probably just let somebody else do a 20-minute model

I've redone the reflectivity/glow map... the cockpit just doesn't look nice when it's reflective. Same URL. Last change, honestly.

It's fine as it is, metal bits/scratches are very shiny, everything else is a bit.

okay, really nice bevels and metal textures arg! but i got to sa the geh copter is more sexy.

I agree, the Fuglycopter is far cuter

There's a lot of objects in this, 15 objects in a heli that I could pull to 3 objects....

And frankly, I can't texture that, I'm not able to spend the time to break it back into quads. I can agree with rattle, this is ridiculous.

Why would you break it into quads? Oh, you're going to 3DO it... lol! Kinda defeats the purpose, but might be funny.

You can untesselate models, you know? There's a plugin for wings3d which comes with it by default. Untesselate + minor fixing = 10 mintutes at maximum spent.

To Argh: It was people like you that forced me to learn s3o, and quads, because the way I texture, I don't like having to constantly remove edges.

To Rattle: I'll look into that.

Here's what I got after 3.5 hours. I spent 30 mins on fixing and cleaning up the model, which was definitely not ready for texturing. I found problems like all the faces became unwelded in 3DS Max, and stuff like extra edges which unnecessarily complicates texturing.

I call it the LOLCOPTER.


Last thing you'll ever see:

What's the point of this, anyway? That you can make a crap model, give it a crap uvmap and texture, and be satisfied with it? And then boast that nobody else wants to touch your crap model with a 10-foot pole without realizing that nobody wants to touch it precisely because its crap.

By your own admittance its a crap model, a hack-job you spent all of 20 minutes making, so please don't think that my constant usage of the term "crap model" is trying to insult your modelling skills. What I'm insulting is the premise that you feel you're superior to the rest of us because you're more willing to accept a crappy model and a crappy uv while we're busy striving to do the very best job we can.

Where I come from, spending time to do something right should be praised, not doing everything you can to cut corners (non-literally, in this case...) and do a half-assed job.