Ok, so I just started to learn blender, haven't done textures yet, but will be doing that tomorrow and possibly starting into animations, all for the glory of EmpiresMod. Looking for some feedback on this, bear in mind, it's my first model and it's not even attempted to be textured yet. When it's done, I will make it available to all mappers for use and hopefully some will find it desirable. Don't ask me why I picked a lamppost, it just came into my mind so I went with it. The lighting was done to give it a nice ingame preview of it's intended use. I have not studied lighting at all nor how it interacts with models yet, so I could use some info on that too, but I'll be watching some tuts on that in the future as well. Mainly, seeking two things here: 1. From a modellers perspective (if we have any on here still) what is bad/good about it? what would you change? anything else you can offer a noob modeller... 2. From an Empires perspective, does this fit into the Brenodi Architecture style?? If not, what would I change/add to it?
And turn off smoothing groups on the four supports around the bulb. It fits BE, but you may have to compile it as two separate props, or get people to use four spotlights to get patterned lighting. Polycounts look a bit all over the place, rather high for something so small, but it's a model, sure enough.
1. What Mayama said. It looks too high poly to be used in game, and too low poly / low detail to be of any use baking normal- or detailmaps. Tutorial on sharp edges in Blender watch that, remove the subdiv modifier and see the smoothness you can achieve without the use of subdivisions or millions of polys. Also, Blenders default setting for circles / cylinders is 32 vertices. For something like this, bring it down to 8-12 somewhere. Unless you're making a highpoly version for baking ofc. 2. This is rather subjective. But imo, sure. Why not? Most people around here use 3DSMax I believe, but there are a few of us Blenderheads around. If you run into any weirdness just ask away and I'll try to help.
i'm redoing it as there already is a bunch of good reasons too. next will be low poly and smoothed. but i wont be posting img till i can get it to compile and viewable in sdk
From an empires perspective: I like how it has an oppressive feeling, which really fits with the Brenodi Empire.
