Spring RTS Engine

My second attempt at a model. This one is a bit more traditional in design compared to the rotating fortwall concept

Solar, high tricount, area intended for teamcolor highlighted.


edit: updated picture

we have a lot of solar models.

smoth wrote:we have a lot of solar models.

I know that :)

I am just training and taking my first steps in modelling, so i practice on some simpler concepts before i make my first serious attempt at an ingame model with texture and such.

then you'd better start using wings3d (imo) and not ehm, sketchup?

3 Hours?! my uvmaps don't take longer than 45 minutes.

It really depends on the model for me- some things just take a lot longer than others.

But there are a lot of things I'm very picky about, and you don't want to have to screw around with it in the middle of painting. Uvmapping can either save you a lot of time and help you squeeze more out of a model faster and make it look a lot better... or it can be a major pain, that makes painting a lot harder. The extra time spent on the map is usually worth it. The 3 hours figure was for the Overlord, which has a bazillion small parts. It's almost always directly proportional to the number of parts for me.

It's not a case of time it's a case of figuring out what part of the map corresponds to what part of the model. And then there's all the fun, games and joy of uv and model errors only spotted when you're halfway through the texturing stage...

If you're having trouble with that, I suggest a couple of "little rules" I use:

1. Try to keep like with like, wherever possible, when setting up the map. IOW, if you have pieces of a turret, try keeping them in the same general area. Sometimes this is impossible, in which case, you just have to deal- fill the area with hot pink, look for the hot pink area, etc. Sometimes on really tricky stuff, I'll draw guidelines in a separate layer. Usually, if I have to resort to that nowadays, it's either a model with a ton of really nasty organic shapes, or I screwed up. If you want to see an example of that, I could put one up for peeps at some point.

2. Always keep "up" and "right" consistent, wherever practical. I've lot count of how many times this has kept things easier on the painting end, and it rarely has a serious effect on the total efficiency of your resulting map (if it does, well it's a "rule" that's meant to be broken, obviously). For stuff like that gun, for example, a lot of it's obviously "side" or "top"- just like a RTS model, you can probably get away with very low rez on "bottom", unless you're doing some really fancy reload animation and the bottom will get seen a lot. Organize "side" and "top" pieces so that there is as much consistency as you can manage, and you'll find that all of a sudden, it gets a lot easier to match up your lines, etc.

Lastly, there aren't any places in painting where the Level-of-detail tricks can't be used. For FPS models, you just need to be trickier. That can save you a lot of space sometimes, although with stuff like a view-model, that's hard to achieve.

And of course, these are all just my opinions.

Hoi wrote:then you'd better start using wings3d (imo) and not ehm, sketchup?

As soon as wings provides anything but primitive tools for drawing models, i'll start using it. Sketchup is really good, the first modelling program thats not a pain in the ass to use. And i have tried many of 'em in courses at school.

1. Get 3dsmax
2. Learn 'spline modelling' (basically, highly advanced 'drawing')
3. Win

Effin' son-of-a-eff British Typhoon.

Really all that's done is the overall camo pattern/colour layout and some detail work on the tail. These bastards-on-wings were usually armed with four 20mm automatic cannons and up to 10 fin-stabilized air-to-ground rockets. Camoflage is standard late-war high-contrast disruptive with olive green and grey, with light grey undersurfaces.

Uh wings is the least complicated modeling program I've used to day, for low poly modeling that is... but that's just personal preference anyway.

...and thanks to wings3d properly UV mapping low poly non-human models takes like 15 minutes, 30-45 for the UV layout and and another 30 minutes for tweaks, at maximum.

reivanen wrote: As soon as wings provides anything but primitive tools for drawing models, i'll start using it. Sketchup is really good, the first modelling program thats not a pain in the ass to use. And i have tried many of 'em in courses at school.

Funny, I get all I need out of wings and while I am not pro, I think I do pretty well. We do not need anything more than a mesh editor for spring.

Done.

Guessmyname wrote:1. Get Rhino
2. Learn 'spline modelling' (basically, highly advanced 'drawing')
3. Win

Fixed.

3dsmax is more supported. And I picked it up in a matter of days and made that gun in it with all the tutorials floating around. If that's not good, you have your standards too high.

Max has a horribly cumbersome ui

smoth wrote:Max has a horribly cumbersome ui

This.

Maybe it's because the tutorials were that much better, but I actually found Blender easier to pick up than Max. I mean, Max is more _conventional_, but it's UI is just as utterly inscrutable as Blender's.

Eh. I find it more ordered, to be honest. Blender always drove me up the wall even with all the tutorials

actually, after a few hours with the max ui it's pretty simple, I do advice to change the theme to the less distracting (dark grey?), the only thing hard about max is that it has got oodles of options, so you need to know what you're doing, and where to find the option you need.

Yeah, as Hoi said. Follow the tutorials (they come with it), they'll point you in the right direction. It helps that it's almost completely different to wings3d. The only irritating things I find it lacks / I haven't discovered yet are:
-The ability to select multiple verts and set their locations in specific axis (the absolute-move thing locks out when multiple verts are selected)
-Some equivalent of the 'Scale To' trick in wings.
-Moving the pivots. Not the object pivots, the selection pivots. Like, say, I want to rotate these faces in a model around this point here, rather than the centre of the selection.

Maybe they have improved it but when I used it in a college project I hated the ui. So no hoi, I don't think a few hours. Maybe the ui has cleaned up.. maybe.

GMN is there a contiguous mesh mode or are we still stuck fucking with welding constantly?

-The ability to select multiple verts

Hold control and click? Dunno about the axis thing though.