I have put smoothing groups on the tower, I'm leaving the hard edges on the vertical lines on purpose as you can see that's what it's like in the reference picture. I've also chamfered the edges of the bottom but only a small sized one, I might make it more noticeable but this is going to be quite a large model, as much as 100ft high but we'll see what it looks like in game.
I don't think those are hard edges in the picture, they're rusty/dirty seams in the metal plates where the paint is flaking off, the plates themselves will be close to perfectly curved, otherwise they wouldn't fit together very well. Basically it should be texture detail, not smoothing groups. The base might benefit from a bit of a harder chamfer, but yeah if it's huge, you will probably notice it better up close, your discretion.
does it need a hole? Why can't the ladder just go up to the platform and there be no rails at that point? Anyways... how do we get a ladder attached to that? the base looks wider then the top. Ladders only go strait up or down last I noticed. Can we make ladders that go at an angle? If we can't make angled ladders just put some handholds on one of the legs that goes up to the platform. Mapper can paint climb strip on that. Also.. on a purely realistic note, that water pipe in the middle is a tad too thin unless that water tower is actually very huge. Can we have the pics updated with a to scale human?
You run the ladder up one of the support legs, that's how you do it IRL anyway, which is why you need a hole, because otherwise the ladder has to be hanging several feet off the tower. You can make ladders however you want, the brush is just a surface you stick to. Like I said, there's a huge ladder prop in source already, no need to add one to the tower, we can just stick the prop on it if we need a ladder. Also it is huge, the catwalk at the top is about the width of a person. Oh also, I just thought, add more sides to the cylinder, you can see the polygons really easily.
could you also make a baseless prop in case mappers wanted to create their own bases. Sry if this has already been answered.
The base will be seperate from the legs which will be separate from the water cylinder. As for the polycount of the cylinder I think it will look okay when I have it textured and I will see how the smoothing groups of the lower half look when textured too. I'll be smoothing the edges of the platform so it won't be so obviously segmented but I don't think that's necessarily a bad look when you're talking about a massive metal structure, it's perfectly reasonable to assume that they would make it in straight sections. It also gives us more polys to play with in other places too. In the end this is just a map prop so I don't really want to go over 5k for the highest detail LOD. As for the ladder I plan on making one of the poles look climbable and then cutting a hole in the platform at the top. The mapper can then add the climbable brush to the prop if he wants it climbable.
The thing about polycounts is it depends what you're modelling, this is a major feature prop which takes up a large amount of onscreen space, so 5k polies is probably quite conservative. Rounding off that cylinder would make it look a lot nicer and only add another couple of hundred, which is well worth it on something this size. It'd probably look OK as is, but it would look better with more.
I picked that polycount for it as that was the amount the reference picture had, I'm still curious to see what it looks like with the smoothing groups the way they are at the bottom, it will give clear definition with the lighting instead of it just being smooth across. If it doesn't look great once textured I'll create a higher poly version for the nearest LOD and just use the current one for the second LOD, no wasted work EDIT: On looking at it again, if you mean the roof on it then you're right I could just increase the polycount on that. Because it's siluoetted against the sky the lower polycount is very obvious. I might double the polycount there atleast.
The roof mainly, but the drum itself will be silhouetted against the dark of the roof, source doesn't really do shadowing very well on models as they use per-vertex lighting. Also the platform for the same reason, all of this mostly because you'll be looking at it from the ground.
I wanted to steer away from having absolutely everything up top perfectly round, I find that sometimes angular structures enhance the smoothness of what's behind them. It's kind of like, look at our smooth tower, we can do smooth but we didn't want to for the walkway because you know, sometimes metal is straight. I didn't realise everything will be vertex lit, it seems odd to be using something that went out of date 10 years ago, are there options to set things to per-pixel lighting or is that just not done in source? I'll bump up the polycount on the water cylinder then and see how everything looks after it's textured.
The game is rapidly approaching 10 years old. Nothing is per pixel, source uses lightmaps for its brush geometry, but the pixels on the lightmap (luxels) are like 32 inches big by default in empires, very blurry. Props have no capacity for mapped lighting, it's all vertex shading. They all use vertexlitgeneric, world geometry uses lightmappedgeneric.
man if that stuff is all separate someone could make this map super easily using the struts: not trying to derail just couldnt resist saying that. that thing is sick, i thought it was more like 20 feet tall initially.
Just had literally 20 minutes to look at this tonight. Doubled the polycount for the part of the water tower above the walkway, personally I like the look of the lower half underneath with the separate smoothing groups, I guess we won't know what it will look like in the end until it's textured and in game. If it looks crap then it really won't be that hard to swap it out. Anyway the top part looks much better now
I kinda like it the way it is now. just add the ladder area and we are set? ohh btw, whats the poly count on the rails? It looks sexy the way it is but, if we need to shave poly's while keeping it looking good that would probably first to shave around. Im not a modeler so I may not know what im talking about though. If im wrong tell me why.
Those rail models will be for the closest LOD. On the next lod I will replace them with a transparent plane so they shouldn't eat into the budget too much
Yeah you can fade those to just a flat texture and it'll look fine. Top does look a lot better, bottom looks better in that pic than the other one, so yeah see how it looks textured.
They're set per-model as far as I know, you put them in the QC I think whenyou compile it. Use the model viewer in the sdk to look at some other models, it might be listed in there.
Ah great thanks, that'll make things easier EDIT: Oh and on reading about the model scale in the dev wiki am I right in thinking that props are 16 units = 1 foot? For a 100ft tower I'd be looking at 1600 units high?
I don't know for sure though, honestly I just built all my models in separate parts, that way I can fade out the expensive bits using hammer's fade system, and I can add/remove bits as appropriate to the situation. Easier than LODing and more useful. Source model compiling is horrible enough.
