jtr7 on 25/12/2007 at 00:51

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Awriiight!:D

tdbonko on 25/12/2007 at 03:39

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Wings3d is a powerful modeling tool. If you create a technician stuff ( my nightmares these days) it helps me a lot. I am creating many different gear wheels, look how simple it is, in five steps.

create cylinder and select side polys.
http://two.xthost.info/dejan/Image009.jpg
Than choose inset
http://two.xthost.info/dejan/Image010.jpg
resize polys
http://two.xthost.info/dejan/Image011.jpg
than choose extrude\normal
http://two.xthost.info/dejan/Image012.jpg
extrude polys
http://two.xthost.info/dejan/Image013.jpg
it's done.
It is a raw gear whell.

Yandros on 25/12/2007 at 09:43

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I just turned on smoothing for the whole model because I haven't begun texturing it yet. I'll probably use it on the seat and cylindrical crosspieces but not the legs or rectangular pieces under the seat.

Schwaa2 on 26/12/2007 at 17:35

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Cool, looks like you're geting the hang of it Yandros.

I think I'll have to give it a go one of these days just so I know how it is.

Barstool looks good but extremely high poly. I've gotten to the point where I think 14 sides is about right for making cylinders looks round but not being overdone.
Looks like you used about 50 sides for the top of that stool and with the bevels I think you're probably approaching 1,000 polys for that model.
You should deffinately try to cut that down, if you put 5 of em in a detailed room you're gonna have a large possiblity of crash due to 'too many polys in que'.
All those small cylinders for the braces should probably be squares, that'll save a few hundred polys.
You should be able to make a pretty decent looking stoll like that for T2 under 400 polys.

Also be careful, if any of those polys intersect they will be cut by BSP.
For example. The square legs are 2 polys per side. If only one of those cylinders cuts into the square leg it will turn into probably 80 polys. The only thing you can do is leave a slight gap between the leg and the cylinder brace, or build the brace into the leg by creating faces of the leg around the end of the cylinder. It will still be high poly that way but bsp won't cut it. The result would probably be a leg of 40 polys instead of 80 after BSP.
Also, when BSP cuts it it leaves the polys of the leg inside the cylinder (there will probably be about 16 of those and they won't be seen so they are wasted). But not only that it will leave polys cut from the cylinder inside the leg, so that's probably another 40 polys. And that's only one side of the square leg and one brace. Meaning each leg will turn into several hundred polys with only one brace, that doesn't count the splitting that'll happen from intersections of the top of stool or second brace.


So right now if your stool is 1,000 polys and all the legs/braces/top interesect/overlap each other BSp is gonna turn it into 2,000-3,000 polys.
Most likely BSP will just crash anyway and without forcing it to work (Shadowspawn knows how, I don't) you won't ever see it in game anyway.
So I'd try to run it thru BSP first, then worry about getting it textured.
But I'd really recommend rebuilding with a strict polycount in mind.
--EDIT--
Here's a pick since my explanation might not be that easy to understand
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/5074/afterbspli4.jpg
The green outlines the original polys, the pink lines are the polys after being run thru BSP. The vertical cylinder overlapped polys of the horizontal cylinder. Note the drastic increase in polycount.
This is what cuases 'sliver triangle' errors in BSP also, if you notice the base of the vertical cylinder, next to the green lines are some very tiny polys, slivers.

@atricom,
Smoothing can be determined on a material basis in the E file.
The material has a line that'll say PHONG. That's smoothing, it's smoothing as Dark renders it, you really can't change the amount of smooth.
For sharp edges replace PHONG with FLAT and Dark will render with flat shading instead of smoothed shading.
Of course that means the stool would need 2 material slots, even if they both used the same texture. You'd apply one of them to all the round parts and one of them to the square parts. They can still be UV mapped as if they only used one material.

Schwaa2 on 27/12/2007 at 10:22

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hmm...that's funny. In my (http://www.darklurker.com/st/S_ElecLight.zip) break lights demo I had quite a few high polys trees, houses, lights,ect... everything around 1,000 polys +

Once I got about 5-6 trees on screen with everything else I got crashes in Dromed due to polys in que. It does happen, and it does happen from object polys. Once I deleted a tree or 2 the error went away and the error only happened with all of them on screen at once.

This is my new dual core, Nvidia 6800 GTS with 2 gigs ram

Anyway, it doesn't hurt to be polygon minded, it is T2 after all. And like I said, that stool may be only 1,000 polys now, but after BSP it's gonna be 2-3,000 which really is too much for a barstool in any modern game.

The whole point of low-poly modelling is to learn how to make low poly models that look good without taxing the processing system more than nessecary.