Need help

I dont think there is a maximum anymore, well not one within reason.

but still you should always avoid having any unnecessary geometry in your mesh just as a general standard when modelling.

AFAIK the usual polycount for fighters and freighters is around 4000-8000 and highter for capships. To be honest, there is no that much need for higher poly ships for FL. With skill a person can make an amazing looking ship from dunno 2000 polygons with a good texturing.

The poly count is VERY relevant. Once you go through the steps of texturing, it is not an easy thing to edit the geometry. First, go to the utilities tab, hit More, and use the poly count tool. Those engines of yours are way too high poly, you can def reduce them. You’d be surprised how quickly things add up. Also, make sure you have no N-Gons (Polygons with more than 4 sides). You seem to have found the MeshSmooth tool, which is fine, but it can produce some nasty geometry on a model not ready for it.

From there we move on to UV mapping. -

Sizer wrote:
As for the other part of your question, you’ll need a few things.

A) a Modeller and UV editor. Most good modelling suites come with one, though there are several stand alones. Personally, I use Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max.

B) a raster image editor. There are several free ones, but I find them all lacking. If you can get Photoshop CS5 or better, I’d do so.

Here’s the catch. This software can be pretty daunting to just dive into. There are many simpler and sometimes easier to learn programs out there, but honestly they limit how good your end results can be.

Next, Technique! Now, the FL modding community has a tendancy to go with what is called tiled texturing. It is VERY easy to do. It also usually looks terrible. There are ways to make it look good. I’ve seen maybe two FL community texturers in the last decade who’ve pulled it off (hats off to ye, Fagu). Your other option is texture painting. This is hard to pick up, but once you get to a certain point in experience, everything looks great for minimal effort.

Now, all that being said, here’s the scary stuff. UV mapping. It is a thankless, tedious, mind numbing job, but crappy UVs can ruin a model, worse than a bad texture can. UV mapping is the laying out of a 3D model onto a 2D space (XYZ to UVW) so that a two dimensional image may be applied to the surface. There are also two general ways to go about UV mapping. You can lay them out without care for overlapping and use tiled textures, or you can lay them out in prep for painting. One takes waaaaaaaaaay longer. I’ll let you take a guess at which one it is. Again, setting up for painting lets you get waaaaaaay brtter results in the end run.

Now all this being said… Tutorials. TSP has an old pdf laying around Drizzts modeling and texturing tut. Its crap. Sure, it was fine back in the day, but remember how I said most of the FL community clings to tiling texture and auto UVs? That tut is why.

If you need to get your head around the workings of 3ds max, maya and photoshop pro then I’m amazed that anyone takes up modelling as a hobby. That’s my idea of torture! They cost a small damn fortune too unless you’re a student.

Use the UVW unwrap modifer to edit the UV mapping. It’s pretty powerful once you get the hang of it. Also you can split off parts of the UV map to other textures as is done a lot by the FL original models which will make texturing much easier.

To reduce polys and keep a really good model shape, search for a script called LOD creator. You should be able to find it on one of the major Max script sites. Light years better difference between what it does then the Optimize modifier built into Max, which does a pretty bad job of optimizing a mesh.

Its honestly best to do optimization by hand. It is VERY good to get an eye for such things. One of the reasons why I like Maya so much is that once you learn it, you can customize HUD display modes to show you messy stuff without actually correcting it. It allows you to learn how to fix things, and also doesn’t try to apply semantic rules when you may not want it to do so.

As for the number of textures involved, yeah, its good to keep the resolution the same for all UVs based upon scale. You don’t want to assign more resolution to similar sized pieces of a model than others. IE, you assign 300x300 space to a wing that is the same size as a piece you assigned 150x150. There will be a noticeable difference in quality, which is to be avoided. There are a lot of tuts out on google, however, none specifically focused on the workflows good for FL. I keep meaning to make a vid of model work flow, start to textured to import ready. I should probably do that.

Here are a few links to texturing tutorials…

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHNDPSdGHyo
• http://www.creativecrash.com/3dsmax/tutorials/materials-and-texturing/c/
• http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorials/3ds-max-how-to-uvw-map-and-texture-part-1-basics-part-2-advancing
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoUzm_x2wP4

As a guide on polygons: biggest ships around 20,000 work OK even on my XP machine. From there up, the more polygons, the more jumpy my display gets. Don’t forget it’s not just the one ship, there may be two or more big’uns and then a fleet of other ships and NPCs and so on in your vicinity, and your computer has to generate and manipulate all of them.

Remember some like me still use 1.4GHz laptops! Otherwise they’re not going to appreciate your work.

Sizer, please do make your vid, that would be super.

As you say old tools were great in their day (I would not call them crap because they were difficult to produce 10 years ago and were made by people learning programming too) but there are far better ones now, and you guys have learned to use them better too.

There is no other game out there that offers such high levels of gameplay and modding and modelling all at once.

Tutorials are the way to bring more people into this community, so you gurus out there, please open the mysteries for us plebs as soon as possible. Then I will have a hobby in my old age, which is just round the corner!

When inside Max press “M” to get a popup window where you can assign the model a texture/material and after that press “F10” to get another window with all sorts of options for rendering and then hit “render”, you’ll get a very nice picture/render that way.

HunterSteel wrote:
Well, I made a new model. This one has 485 polygons in it.
.
.
.
Would this be better?

~Hunter

For shore, as first ship paintjob.
BS wil be no problem after.