Vehicle Ovehaul Thread

so i just came to the conclusion to ignore these thingies at the bottom of the turret (mainly because a not hull included ML is easier to blend out)

i worked a bit on the reloader:


and i also added several armour plates to the turret (siglink)

and i just thought my plan through again
i will ignore the lowpoly i already made and just focus on the highpoly
when this is done i will just degrade the high- to a new lowpoly

 

I hope for your sanity that those plates arent part of the tank mesh or else smoothing the corners for the highpoly of the tank will become a trip to hell.

 

thanks for the advise, yes they are part of the turret
but why should i even smooth them? they are not intended to be smooth

and i tried turbosmooth on the tank before and it didnt gave me the results i wanted, so im just gonna add details by only adding polys and maybe chamfering some edges

 

THISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHISTHIS


If I learn to model thats going to be first on my list.






Also, Firewarrior, Don't listen to the polycounting cheapskates, all the little details on the turret and around the hatch look beautiful.

 

If you dont slightly smooth every corner of your model your highpoly will be of poor quality. You need to smooth every corner of your model. In reality nothing has a super exact edge.



Look at that highpoly tank model. Theirs not a single perfect edge, everything is smoothed. The reason for this is that it makes the bumpmap reflect light on the edges like in reality. It makes the ingame model look way more believable.

Oh and its a horrible horrible job if you have to do complex shapes cause of the way turbosmooth and meshsmooth work in 3DsMax.




Thats a basic turret model I made for a Tank. The first picture is properly smoothed. The second one is turbosmoothed with smoothing groups selected in the turbosmooth menu. What looks better? The first one and the bumpmap would reflect the light in the same way ingame.

Long story short: You need to smooth every corner or else you dont have light reflecting from those corners ingame.

 

if you want to smooth edges, you dont use turbosmooth in smoothing group mode
you use it in normal mode and just add supporting edges near the slightly to be smoothed edges

btw you can achieve the same effect by just chamfering those edges

but yeah i know what you mean

 

You cant chamfer it because 3DsMax fucks stuff up. Chamfering only works if its a very very simple model. I assumed that you use smoothing group turbosmooth because of the hard edges.



Thats what happens if you chamfer / smooth complex shapes. Tons of lighting errors.

 

Most people make it in PS cause they want to show off with their ultra smooth high poly model

 

It looks like someone interpolated normal neighbour faces and used that for lighting calculation. Including those that clearly aren't facing same direction. That means trigger happy smoothing groups even on things that shouldn't have normal averaged.

 

I dont know the technical detail. Lets say 3DsMax really sucks at lighting calculation. The same model in Maya would not have such errors. Their are Materials (for money) that can help with that issue but its a flaw in the programm itself.

 

In Maya you don't care how polygonal tools calculate normals. You just fix it later on by hand. I don't think it's different in 3dsmax, but I wouldn't know (or care). You make the shape first, then care about normal / gourad shading.

 

this

i dont really care that much how much time i have to spend later on on making those smooth edges
i worry more about running out of ideas for details

time isnt realy that much of an issue as it takes quite long afterwards for the models to go ingame

 

Also, I don't think its physically possible for an algorithm to know what should be a hard edge and what shouldn't. Unless you purposely avoid all techniques that cause 'errors' (and hopefully not waste a lot of time doing so) there is no way to avoid awkwardly directed vertex normals. Also keep in mind that most of it will be obscured by a diffuse map.

 

i just want to mention that i more or less will have to smoothe these edges by hand as im building a highpoly out of a lowpoly, its kinda a different process

so i just added all these boltholes as floating geometry:

 

+1 for high detail?

 

I'm sorry -- this is probably a stupid question, buuuuuuuuuuuuuutttttttt...

Isn't the BE med one of the most beloved tanks of Empires? Why is it being redone? Why not something more in need..say, AFV, or NF Heavy?

 

because MOOtant want a higher resolution normalmap of it and it has some nasty unnecessary tris which you only see in wireframe

 

and because of be med tank tossing with the current model?