Aeghiss' attempts at 3D art

[Aeghiss]

So yeah, I've been willing to try making some 3D for quite some time now... So as I'm in holidays ( ) with Aeghiss stuck at the hospital, not much to do and as there's no way I go back to work before having spent two-three real free days, I started tinkering a bit with Blender and... Here's the current state of my first try.

[LigH]

Quite elaborate for a "first try", and a lot of polygons ... quads, mostly.

As quads can be non-planar, their triangulation is ambiguous, most engines will prefer you defining triangles, or assume a method like the shorter diagonal. Also you may want to define seams as possibly sharp edges of areas which would use smooth polygon edges inside, as well as UV mapping borders.

Sorry for burying you under a heap of keywords.

[Aeghiss]

I don't know well the engine yet so I based this on the cylinder and torus that are among the basis mesh objects available in Blender. And yeah, these are made of quads.
About the number of polygons... Well, I don't even know how to check how many it uses.

And regarding the keywords... I must speak English better than many French persons... Yet I'm no bilingual and regarding a technical talk... Well, I fear it will be hard for me to follow you.

< Aeghiss actually didn't understand almost the whole sentance. >

[LigH]

About the number of polygons... Well, I don't even know how to check how many it uses.

In Blender: Look at the top, there are statistics – Verts (vertices), Faces (quads or triangles), Tris (triangles when triangulated)

A bow for a gaming engine should probably not exceed about 100 vertices, even with such a complex bending design.

[Aeghiss]

Oh. Yeah, I understand. And well, I didn't necessarily meant it for PS but I get your point. Though... Can't it really exceed such a low number of polygons ? I mean, my bow uses ten times more and I don't feel like it's extremely detailed.
Well, with the current PS engine I assume a low number of polygons would be best... With the move to UE, I assume that the possible number of polygons for an item should get much more flexible. Knock on wood for that.

[Jilerel]

PS Hacker and amateur of Blender & game coding here.

Without the unoptimized shadows of CS, you can run more than 5 000 000 polygons on a low end computer on PS.
Plus, with the current computers, game engines can handle more than thousands of polygons for simple items without problems (that is, if you forget unoptimized shaders)

Most recent games have weapons that have more than 1000 polygons, going up to more than 10000. (Half Life 2 has for example about 2000 polygons for the simple pistol, but that's a FPS)

But even if our limits with polycount gets pushed off higher and higher, it's still a good practice to keep the poly count as low as you can.
The decimate modifier might help you in that in Blender, but it can lead to some mesh glitches, so be sure to check everything by yourself in edit mode.
You used too much polygons because you tried to give the bow a smooth look with only vertices, but shaders have a huge part in making something smooth or not  . For example, click the smooth shading in the toolbox.

I would say that for a game, this bow should have like between 500 and 5000 polygons, depending on the game engine, the target audience, and if you're using a lot of high res models at the same time. For PS using CrystalSpace, <1000 polygons is good.

[Dilihin]

While PS uses Crystal Space atm, it's good to keep in mind that things are chancing and PS  is moving to Unreal Engine.So ultimately CS limits aren't as important as UE limits (don't know UE details myself)

[LigH]

Aeghiss, you can conceal most of the loss a low polygon model introduces with edge smoothing (see the article about Gouraud shading as brief introduction), detailed textures, and possibly even normal maps for an enhanced impression of both the roundness and some bumps in the surface. But these are advanced steps which can well be applied after a high polygon model has been created to display the desired design in a higher quality.

To summarize: Your first attempt is not bad. It is just a quite early stage, there are several techniques to optimize it further for use in a gaming engine. Enabling smooth edges for your mesh is a next step to consider, for presentation.

[Aeghiss]

So yeah, here's the current version, with smooth shading enabled.
It's actually a bit more than a thousand polygons, so I'll see if I can get rid of some unnecessary ones.

And, well, thank you for your support LigH (or Ere or whatever ).

[Volki]

Considering the simplicity of the bow, I would reduce the number of tris by at least half. That would probably help it look less clay-like as well.

[Aeghiss]

It seems the "planar" decimate worked quite well in my case (contrarily to the collapse and un-subdivide which were... ugh).

So here is the before-after. As you can see after applying the decimate modifier it uses around half the previous number of polygons. Can you guess which is which ?

[LigH]

Nice progress, Aeghiss.

One of the next steps may be defining seams. They can have different purposes. Imagine them like the borders of foil around a chocolate bar: You can use them to define borders where parts of the texture can be separated in the "UV mapping process". Also you can use them to define sharp edges inside the smoothed surface. I could imagine two "rings" of seams to separate the middle handle from the outer "wings", and two seams along the thin edges of the wings to separate the front from the back. Unwrapping the two wings symmetrically could help saving texture space, by mapping the same texture on both wings, if they are supposed to look the same (possibly even the same on the front and the back).

But that takes some amount of imagination and experience. Naively, I would guess it may look like this when applied. But hard to tell without your model. No, I won't have time to do it...

[Aeghiss]

Well, I have no texture to apply to the bow so I think I'll stop to this step, uh ?

Anyway, here's a great helm I made today.

[MishkaL1138]

Well, I have no texture to apply to the bow so I think I'll stop to this step, uh ?

Anyway, here's a great helm I made today.

DEUS VULT!

[Volki]

You should separate the smoothing groups for the separate metals.