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.
whats considered low poly for characters or vehicles in video games, also.. how do tell how many poly's you have with the poly counter?.. am i supposed to be looking at faces?
alright thanks mike, your always there to help.. earlier today i had a hankoring to play battle tanx 64, but i dont have it.. so i was wondering how accurately i'd be able to model a low poly tank compared to what they did at 3DO.. i may post some WIP pics later on today, thanks again
For anyone looking to get into game modeling, I'd recomend starting out very low. The first game models I did were in the 500 triangle range. Starting low definitely gets your head in the mindset of being as efficient as possible, which still needs to be done even for 6000 poly models.
"The numbers you need to shoot for are 800 faces for the highest level, 500 faces for next level and 300 for the lowest level." - That's from an article talking about modeling Quake 3 Arena player models... Thanks fredriksson for that tid bit...
Well, games are starting to not utilize high polycounts and instead go for the newer technology behind normal mapping and hieght maps to achieve a highpoly look (except maybe fighting games).
The new game "Far Cry" which looks really cool (demo is fun) has characters utilizing the "polybump" technology so they have characters of 1500 polys but they LOOK about twice that.
This is something my studio also uses (or a variation there-of) and I think most games are going to make use of until the next big technology breaks out, but even then, I can't see this getting much better.
Polybump is the same or at least similar to the normal mapping technology being used in other games, ala Doom 3. It's using a per-pixel algorithm to calculate lighting and self-shadowing and the like instead of per-vertex, allowing for a huge difference in percieved form.
It's implemented in a variety of ways, all of which that I know of needing some sort of plugin. The two main ways are creating a high-res mesh and a low res version of that same mesh. Then, using plugins you are able to bake the pixel information from the high res into the low res in the form of a texture known as a normal map.
The other way it's normally done is by simply converting created textures into normal maps by using b/w hieght maps using a photoshop plugin.
Games do convert all polys to triangles when they're in the engine. You do not necessarily have to triangulate the model in the 3D app, although it can be a good idea.
Those far cry pictures are class . I've tried using ATI's normalmapper to create a normal map from a high poly model, haven't got it working yet though.
I was wondering would there be much slowdown in frame rate though as per pixel calculations are very intensive. Or does the reduction in geometry compensate for that.
yes, you'd need a nice system to really take full advantage of such heavy pixel shaders, not to mention a recent video card that supports them to begin with.
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