Spring RTS Engine

Erm.. Not very user friendly in my opinion . The fact that I dont know how to UV map doesnt help either . That was approximatly my thrid or fourth attempt to UV map something ever and it shows.

Just not sure how your supposed to UV map something with such irregular lines

Beginning the rework. First shot shows a perspective view of the loft sections; second shows the polysurface, ready to transform into a mesh. As you can hopefully see, I have taken great care to keep the scalar factors the same as Keithus's version, while cutting corners on polycount, because Spring's handling of rounded surfaces will make this look quite rounded in-game.

As a philosophical aside:

a 12-sided columnar section is 24 tris. A 12-sided cone is 12 tris. A 12-sided planar surface is 10 tris. A 12-sided flat ring is 24 tris. What I have now is 214 tris. Expensive, but not too bad. If I was trying to keep tricount below 500 for the whole model, I'd be SOL, but I'm aiming for around 8-900, if I can swing it and still do Keithus's design any justice.

Looking forward to seeing it Argh . Daym, wings looks like it would be ALOT faster than rhino but meh, whatever floats your boat. Looks good proportion wise. Are you sure Spring with be able to make a Large 12 sided sphereiod look believably smooth?

Anyhow heres a quick rework the original, do not look at the UV map on it I havent touched it since I revised it so its gonna look like turd.

.OBJ
http://dl019.filefactory.com/dl/f/a6b5a ... 83723e5b3/

Gone for cleaner lines and dropped whatever the round things on the side were. It now looks like a fat baby when closed. Added something that can act as a jet on the base to hold it up and made the bulbous things look like air intakes.
I figure that the model would look shiny with kewl reflections on the smooth surfaces. Probably have some sort of pulsating FX on the ground below it indicating that there is something blowing downwards to keep the base up.

If I have time I will refine it a little more cutting a few un-needed poly's here and there and adding a thruster at the back of the gun part that would fire while the gun fires to compensate for recoil.

You lost nearly 500 tris, and it looks cooler! Sold!

As for modeling in Rhino- it's not really slower, by any means. If I'm not being ultra-picky about duplicating somebody else's work, for example, I can lay out the lofts really quickly.

The main thing about Rhino that keeps me using it is how powerful the scalar tools are. Mirroring and other things that are often a pain in other modelers is super-easy and 100% accurate. One of the problems with Wings is that when scaling, you tend to end up with verts wandering off true centers, which makes making a very efficient map a real pain.

The ironic thing is that somewhere along the process of duplicating your mesh, I seem to have committed the same sin, and my fancy show-off concept, showing how you can work up a great, very efficient uvmap by using mirroring got trashed in the process. I think I'd better just get some sleep and do it over again- I seem to have to contracted a case of the sucks while at Work for 11 hours yesterday

Are you to busy re-modeling to look at mine. Also, just wanna check something, when I'm reading split it and such, im thinking you mean how its all a solid peice of geomentry, not split into its legs and body and doors ect... or were you talking about somthing entirly different?

aGorm

aGorm: Nah, honestly I'm too tired to do as good of a job as I should be, so let's look at yours really quick.



I did a quick re-model of the base, which is about the only area of your model except for the gun barrel and the edges of the bearings where the gun turns where you can use mirroring and haven't already applied that (to the model, at least).

This is, obviously, pretty extreme, and veeeeeery hard to do in Wings, unfortunately. But, as you can see- since you used a regular octagon for the base, we could just uvmap this slice, using 4 pieces (see color-coding) and then re-import it into our modeler for final assembly- just rotate each piece 45 degrees+, copy-paste, and done.

You can get a LOT more detail out of a uvmap this way, though, so long as it's not an area where the user is going to immediately see that it's all just the same texture repeating. For circular objects, I do this a lot, because the user is only seeing half (or less) of the object at any one time, so therefore there's no need on having the texture be super-detailed, wasting texture space all the way around the object- why not just do one flat, then repeat it X number of times? When I get my cannon mapped, I will go into this in more detail (as well as talk about how to use UVMapper Classic, since it's a great free tool, but it takes a little getting used to, and model prep is harder than it is for making a map in Wings).

But if you do that you get rid of teh nice sticky out bits... still, i suppose you could split it into 4 and then it would have a bit with and a bit without teh sticking out bits.

aGorm

Sorry, I totally ignored the blocks you used to anchor the door-leaves. You'd just mirror them 4 times, just like the door-leaves. It's the concept, not the details- my brain's too tired for details at the moment, sorry for leaving that little bit out've that shot.

Ok, I haven't gotten any new entries- Mr. D and Crampage haven't sent me actual models to look at, so I'm going to do final judging and close the contest tomorrow night. Tonight I need to do some scripting involving little white-armored dudes for another little side-project, so I'll give everybody until 12AM EST to get any final (and yeah, it's gotta be final- I'm out of time) revisions to me.

Dunno if its too late or not, had a school breakup last night. Can never tell if 12AM means noon or night. Anyhow this version has been broken up into peices for the final UV map aswell as making a quick 'n' dirty UV map for it (lotsa wasted space etc.). I figure that I dont have the skills in UV mapping yet to make a workable map for it nor the tools. If you want it at all you'll have to mess with the UV map untill it suits your tastes, its all there it just needs someone with the know how to manipulate it. Clipping into the model was done on purpose to stop any gaps appearing.

There is some obvious clipping on the base but it wouldnt appear if it was ingame.

Actual changes to the model are minimal but obvious.

Guns could probably have been broken up even more to make use of more mirroring but it takes too much effort.

.OBJ
http://dl022.filefactory.com/dl/f/8d7f4 ... ccb34e188/

This post is most likly too late, guess I needa learn to tell the difference in times eh? I wont be around for the next day or so, thus it will be the last entry by me.

I'll take a look. Still haven't seen models from Mr. D or Crampage, so I guess they've dropped out- more's the pity, those were kewl models. Ah well. Final judging will be done soon, and the skinned / animated models will get shown off... as soon as I can get them done, basically. Shouldn't take too long.

Wings is playing up on me, so i cant finish up my model. You will just have to take it as is im afraid

Still, a 7.5 aint bad, seeing as i have never don much modelling before

I'm just out and about to much near christmas to be able t odo any more fixing... hope that wit htaht UV map though its atleast an 8 (which aint bad as it teh first unit I've desinded!)

aGorm

I apologize for this disappearance, but I got a very busy week.

But this is not very serious, my proposition was not the best.

However, congratulations, every body

We understand busy- if you want to send in the model, I can take a look at it after the contest

sooooo, who won?

I've been too busy to make one... but yeah...

Gotta get the skinning done

YOU MEAN YORU NOT GONNA TELL US TILL YOUR DONE!??!?!

Dam you...

aGorm

Whats taking you so long... , I mean I've made and textured a whole model in 1 afternoon. Or are you trying to get the ting in game too... In which case surly were waiting till the next release...

Come on I wanna know who i lost to...

aGorm