Spring RTS Engine

Hoi wrote:...

Not BAKING normals, setting them up.

The ONLY thing you have to do in wings is just click the right edges, right click>edge hardness>hard, just do it man, it takes a few minutes and makes everything look much better...

As you can see what ever you've done yet looks like the boat on the right. What you want is the boat on the left, and as hoi (and myself) said before it doesn't take much time. Auto-smooth (selectable from the object mode context menu) will do most of it for you and doing the rest manually really isn't a challenge. Also, the hotkey g will be your new best friend to quickly select the long edges of your four-, five- or six-sided barrels. So pretty please, with a cherry on top, just do it.

Ahh, ok misread you hoi.

Rattle that ship is a bit of the extreme, whereas the flash I posted would be the other end of the extreme.

Now, if I'm making a cube, I want it to look like a rounded cube, not a square. This goes for a lot of low poly units in spring, you're essentially taking a series of cubes and making them look like they have more geometry/polies/whatever than they actually have. Saves work all around.

But why on earth would you want the barrel of a tank to not look round? Having a normal proportioned 6 sided barrel that is round, be rendered round, is kinda the point don't ya think?

For example, the barrels on that flash tank are square, the point is for them to look round, why would you want them to look cubed? Same for the body, we are talking about something with wierd geometry to begin with, why would you want the blockyness of it to stand out more than it already does?

I'm not doing units anywhere near as complicated as that battleship, in fact, and lot of the units I've been doing are cubes built upon cubes and variations of that. Making their true nature and hard edged right angles be obvious would be pretty ugly and cause the low polyness to stand out. Why would you want that?

tbh, it would probably still look better than it being all soft edges. and for gawds sake people, if you are just gonna paint ota units, use the evolva models, most of them are damned good.

why would you want the blockyness of it to stand out more than it already does?

Because it should be blocky if the concept is blocky. If you don't like the blocky style, why use the tank?

Read, tiny grasshoppa! http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.ph ... 84&start=0

Um.

I wrote a whole tutorial on how to fix these kinds of issues in UpSpring in minutes.

As for roundness, etc., my thought is that it's just a matter of scaling geometry to on-screen typical scales, and applying some common sense. Forb's models are really shiny, and that tends to hide these issues a bit, but it's not a real fix. You really can't circle a square, or make a cube look round. It's just one of those things- it'll look odd at different angles, it's a lot safer to just go ahead and let it be blocky.

You can make stuff that translates as rounded with as few as 5 sides. 4 tends to break stuff, because you're breaking the 89-degree rule for welding. And there are some practical limits on how far you can push stuff before it has welding flaws depending on the lighting angle. But it's easy to see it, and easier still to fix it.

I should note that all of this is situational. It really depends on the object's use and apparent scale. For things with big barrels, go ahead and use 9-15 sides. Make them look rounded from all POVs and angles. It's not the end of the world to spend polycount on stuff like that, and while doing that enough certainly translates into costs on the GPU end, it's very minor compared to the rest of the costs in a practical sense.

Forb, post some models / skins, lemme do some stuff and clean them, maybe this will become a useful discussion. It's what Rattle should have done, but I don't think he knows how to do it with UpSpring, which is why he keeps talking about it as if you need to have your model perfect before you export, which is not accurate. It won't take more than an hour or two to fix everything in Evo and make it look pro in any lighting condition, though.

I suppose the issue here is that mine and rattle's opinion of what looks good differs greatly.

So far I'm the only one who has seen any of the new evo stuff ingame. Argh we are talking about an s3o'd flashtank. Nothing to do with evo.

Argh: you can't do it properly in upspring when soft and hard angles are mixed. This is kind of similar to smoothing groups in max. You don't put everything in the same group.

Cutting some edges is pretty damn easy and doesn't take longer than setting your UV seams up. Automation fails and yes, in lowpoly environments you'll often want to have smooth edges on a 4 sided cylinder. Is that optimal? No but it doesn't matter. However, hard edges where they have no business being are a bad thing.

BTW, 4 sided cylinders look rounder if you place them with an edge at the top instead of a face.

Rattle that ship is a bit of the extreme, whereas the flash I posted would be the other end of the extreme.

No.

If you want the barrels to look round then make them 6-8 sided, not 4 sided, this is not 1997.



(not an extreme example)

huh, 4 and 5 sides are fine too




Unless you are using normal maps, you have to set them up.

Argh: you can't do it properly in upspring when soft and hard angles are mixed. This is kind of similar to smoothing groups in max. You don't put everything in the same group.

I've never said this is a cure-all. But it works just fine, 99% of the time. I'll bet that I can take that trike and make it look just fine in UpSpring without any serious difficulties. Post the mesh, let's compare results.

The only exception is if you need a hard edge on an object that has the same angle as something you need a soft edge on. That happens incredibly rarely, unless you're breaking the rule of 89. Which you really shouldn't be- the additional rendering cost of the extra two triangles it takes to give yourself five-sided columns is minimal.

The only other case where this can happen is when you're deliberately using a faceted look with a rounded look, at similar angles. This really doesn't come up a lot- usually, there's a breaking angle where you keep the facets but gain the roundness, unless you're using identical vert angles. The only time I've had this be anything like a real problem is when I was setting up the welding on the Hammerhead bomber- GMN's modeling of the upper body presented some issues in that regard, and I just had to keep tweaking at 1-degree intervals to get it wound down.

I've been experimenting with using 7 sided barrels lately. It gives a similar effect to 8, but uses less polies, whilst not being a recognisable shape like with 6 - 4 sided cylinders (which are very obviously hexagons, pentagons and squares, respectively)

Having said that, 4 or even 3 sided shapes will work, as long as they're for small / thin cylinders and you don't mind doing a little pre-shading.

My point is, Argh, that I've told Forb pretty early, so he could adapt it to his workflow. I've been playing with the auto-smooth feature and it's nice for simple things but not the solution.

rattle wrote:My point is, Argh, that I've told Forb pretty early, so he could adapt it to his workflow. I've been playing with the auto-smooth feature and it's nice for simple things but not the solution.

As usual, rattle is spot on.

Bleh. My texturing sucks. But the effect isn't that bad ingame :)

Bioshock: Spring?

You probably want to decide what exactly you want the "green" on the unit to be. If it's soft felt-ish stuff, give it a smooth and even texture. I'm guessing you want something metallic though, and for that, overlaying it with a metal texture with less grain and more scratches, making the color a bit uneven, and preshading vigorously would do the trick (amirite, pro modelers?). It'll also help differentiate parts of the unit!

I really love the unit concept, especially the leg design!

Great mesh, lots of character. Hope those are ball joints for the legs, though, otherwise it cannot possibly walk.

Skin is... well, it's skinned. Can't really judge anything, as the solid colors don't give any idea of how much it may be stretched, etc. Wish I had time, I'd offer to paint it.

Yeah they are ball joints at the hips and shoulders.

the only bits I really stretched are the teamcolour areas (which i just paint 0,0,0 black with 100% tc anyway)