Not yet , nor the new online one by pirahna. I stopped playing after Mech 4 mercs.. I have FASA books and heaps of battletech stuff , I love robots
So, one thing to note, think about the distances you'll be seeing these units from. Lots of the smaller details can be done in the texture and it'll be impossible to notice the difference. Also, you should teach yourself about smoothing groups...
I'm starting from scratch as simplifying a complex object by envisioning it from a distance or distant perspective is a fail for me, i suck at making good looking textures to fill in the details. I can make some real awesome art n stuff but making something like a texture for a grill/vent in a unit just looks crap when i do it,, i'll practice heaps more but it usually looks like a MS Paint job effort more than anything Here's My first attempt at making a proper PA unit .... Its an orbital unit of some sort, haven't found a use to it's shape and look yet but i was thinking a secondary Orbital Fighter or an Advanced Orbital Fighter or Fabber. I haven't started on texturing yet but here's my model so far... 602 Poly's im getting there ... slowly lol
Most of the time games these days make extremely high resolution models as the base for the low poly models we use in game. Much of the detail comes from the textures, usually with techniques like normal maps, but also from ambient occlusion maps baked from the high res or from generated "grime maps" and "edge maps" that highlight the edges of geometry usually for adding scratches, dirt and other signs of wear. We don't use normals on our unit shaders, but ambient occlusion and edge highlights can get you a lot of the fine detail features from a high poly model without needing the high poly.
Only if you catch him when he isn't having tea, and he likes the way your ears look, and you agree with his outlook on the PeeWee economy, and he isn't on his period.
Finally got my Model to a point where it's low enough in poly count to work in PA well. Well under 600 polys now 237 verts, 374 tris, 362 faces.. YAY.. AWESOME
Not sure on theme for painting this thing,, so i made it simple. Here's the first pass after UV wrapping.
I seriously don't have texturing skill's But i have sort of worked out where to put stuff and what i'm doing
I'm not judging Max, but I'm curious as to why the polycount on your fighterplanething is so high. It looks quite a bit lower than 600. Are 3dsmax Nurbs Surfaces just super-high-poly or something? Edit: Oh, it's 300 tris. Mind you, the polycount of the Dox is in the higher 800s. 600 is a bit low for what looks like and advanced unit.
I made the concept art first, then i made the first model above out of quads (the grey textureless pix), i put it in blender and converted from quad to tris, and that doubled that poly count, so i removed all the double ups and extra unneeded polys and got the final pic with only just over 300 tris I think the reason the poly count is high is because I'm self taught and i just make things with no regard to end poly count.. that's a bad practice for making game models, i mainly make models for art/animation. (Non real-time rendered models.). I'm used to using sub-divided mesh's for putting in details not textures, so stuff i make tends to come out inadvertently very highly detailed...
example of my putting too much detail in even on low poly models... In the fighter pix you see i countersunk where the grill/vent is on the arm, 10 extra polys there x4 because there are 4 sunken spots one each side top and bottom of the arm. I could have left top and bottom sides of arm flat and just used a texture for the effect i was trying to achieve of the sunken looking vents, same with the bumps on the inside of the arms (Green Bits) they could have just been textured in too saving 14 polys each bump , 14 x 4 = 56 polys .. so 56 + 40 = 96 polys i can still remove from the ship and still have it look the same if it's textured right. *sighs* Ok starting fresh again .. lol I'll see if i can make something better ....
I would also like to state 3Ds Max and Blender really don't work well together...!!! It's ok making things in Max and exporting to blender, usually no issues. But blender exports broken models, i worked on a mech for 6 hours in blender and then exported it for max and it was a mess, nothing lined up and stuff was generally wrong or in wrong place.. the model loads fine in blender but wont load in Max,, Good thing i didn't overwrite the original .fbx . lol
@MushrooMars Ok what do you think of this style ship ?? 80 vertice's, 60 faces, 120 tris in total i call it "The Wedge" ... edited I just realized it was upside down so i removed the pic and re-posted below..
"The Wedge" First pass model , needs more shape but not too much i'm aiming for simple and low poly count so i can spawn billions of them .. lol And from underneath (the original pic i posted before i flipped the camera ,, i was editing underneath the model when i took the screen shot)
Improved revision of my fighter Added 42 extra tris to get shape to the back of the unit .. total 162 tris I made it more PA style and More aggressive looking i think Inspired by TheWrongCat's comment about Descent "The Nasty Wedge" Descent style robot..... Just gotta do some nice simple texturing now
