Question for McKinley

Beer glass scene creation

This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.

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# 1 19-10-2005 , 11:36 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Aug 2004

Posts: 408

Hey, bought your book and it finally arrived today, and I was wondering on Page 33 when you shown the finished sword:

Was there a specific reason why you left the coplanar polygons on the non finger'd side of the grip going from front to back? They seem to just be extra polygons... then again I've never imported any model into a game engine yet -- was that for smoothing? Because it seems to me if its coplanar you can just combine them to 2 triangles... which would cut down on approximately 72 triangles. (Just don't see why a rectangle needed to be subdivided when you can just make it a single rectangle with exactly the same properties)

There's probably a major reason for it -- just want to find out if it was time factors for the books, or if it would actually screw me up if I tried to put my optimized grip into an engine?

Thanks.

Edit: P.S. -- You're really selling Maya hard as a game tool :p

Last edited by Phopojijo; 19-10-2005 at 11:47 PM.

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# 2 20-10-2005 , 04:38 AM

The Maya Mountain
Join Date: Aug 2002

Location: Seattle, WA

Posts: 8,245

You'll actually find out later in the book, toward the end of the modeling phase (page 81, 2nd paragraph under "cleanup"), that I go through a bit of an optimization phase and do indeed remove many of the polys on the backhand of the sword.

I didn't remove them all, however, mostly because I wanted to try to keep the entire handle of the sword as a single UV shell, and because the fingered side of the sword had as much geometry as it did, it helps with the UVs to have at least a couple along the back of the sword to avoid stretching the texture.

I left them there, mostly to have something to do to demonstrate optimization later.

Hope that makes sense. user added image