Trying to design a bug faction in the style of PA has been an off and on hobby of mine pretty much since the game was announced, actually started trying to model things a little while ago. Figured I should start documenting my attempts because its fun to watch somebody learn/try new things and I have questions about the faction I haven't been able to answer myself. I have no technical knowledge whatsoever just in case you almost had any hope something tangible would come of this... ...Anyways question one is how many tris should I be shooting for here? like for a factory, comm, t1 unit t2 unit ect? i have been working mostly on one of the t1 factories (that would work like a lob) Here's a bunch of recent(ish) sketches and my latest attempt at an actual model. my goal was mainly to figure out how to make the body one object without tons of intersecting faces that act like multiple objects.(its booleans, but it turns out uniting two fairly complicated objects makes a whole lot of new triangles all over the place) Tune in sometime tomorrow for question two, which will take a lot of work to illustrate in a simple way and will be strictly artistic in nature.
The Zerg and Tyranid inspiration is strong with this one. Just know that you need to try and stick with as few polis as possible, because the more complicated the model, the more massing it will affect the sim great work bdw
Nice work, looks interesting. Tomorrow if im free I'll go check some of my legion models and will let you know roughly how many tris there are for certain structures and units. As a general rule the lower the better especially for units that you will spam a lot (ala dox).
Thanks guys, low as possible has been the idea, but when you have curvy designs and don't actually know your limits it can be tricky, this is actually attempt number 2 with that "model sheet" and I was able to reduce the tris by about 100 while including way more of the final creature in the model. also I forgot to upload some other screens of that model from more interesting angles, cuz it was 2 in the morning.. ...Aaaanywho question number two is what do you think about using cybernetics as a design crutch? like i could basically stick a bridge and cannons on a whales back and call it a day with the battleship, or i could actually try to think of new things, that's where the crab-claw railguns in z4 came from, but its hard and there's a lot of units (also I'm trying pretty hard to not strait up copy tyranids).
gameplay stuff that I thought would be cool Resource wise I wanted the xiphid to focus more on raw map control by square kilometer, to do this they would have low-yield mine sized power generators and big ol' metal extractors that don't require a metal spot that cant be placed within a certain distance from one another. metal spots would be used for advanced power generators and radar and maybe other techish things. For the units a large portion of their army would be burped up out of lob-like factories on a discounted price and limited service life to encourage aggression and not destroy the server when some idiot AI lands by himself in a system with spotty spawns. tech progression is even simpler than mla and legion in that the commander builds t1 fabbers who then build t2 fabbers. ...Also i figured they would need some kind of rocky base modeled onto them because none of the ground texture things in the base game would cut it. i achieved pretty good results looks-wise my previous attempt at making the factory but it was soooo complex and limited dissolve messes it up too much
Ok so sorry for taking a bit longer to get back to you. Below I'll link some of the units from legion with their respective tri/poly counts. Spoiler: Image Spam Incoming Standard Dox is 685 Tris. Legion Peacekeeper (t1) 732 tris (I think this one was poorly optimized) Legion T1 Air Foundry 2188 tris Old Legion T1 Armor Foundry 1564 tris Legion T2 Earth shaker 636 tris Legion T2 Monstrosity (1952 tris) Lot of tris since you see barely any of these on the field) Thor Titan So as you can see the tri count for my models is a bit all over the place but I hope that this gives you a general idea of what to aim for anyway. Random thing, I was actually beginning work on a new faction a while back but ended up stopping due to lack of motivation. Was also called the Xiphid Spoiler: Xiphid Old Also here's an old WIP titan that I never used in Legion but was going to use for the second faction if I ended up making progress. My plan back then was to make a faction that revolved around very big and very expensive units (factories would be limited or non existant and units would be built like structures since you would effectively not have a massive army like the other races) what kept stuffing me over with making a unique design is the fact that shared armies is a thing. Try to do something unique and non symmetrical compared to MLA then shared armies throws balance out the window.
Probably true, and the fact that they would get metal without metal spots would make them mandatory in team games, dunno how to get around that other than making metal spots the places where you'd place lob-factories, but they would then need tiny/thin models compared to what i was thinking, which wouldn't completely solve the problem and would make them more annoying to command... Anyways those tris are way higher than i was expecting, the model was showing you is sitting at 554 tris before getting arms or booleaning it up. Had plans to simplify the carapace further in future. Very liberating. I see you too really liked the robots from human resources.
I basically restarted everything again but this time with more knowledge and the goal of incorporating arms into the design for real this time as the last design had hilarious stubby arms that didnt really connect with the claws. I simplified it slightly since the pictures were taken but it looks pretty much the same. sits at about 1300 tris.
Mein kampf with laziness has been somewhat continuing since shortly after Christmas/family business wrapped up. mostly I just came up with some lore reasons why I can not worry about connecting limbs to things without the use of polygonal deformation. Basically The xiphid in my mind are slugs from a different dimension made up of stuff incompatible with ours, but they cross over anyways in strange bio-engineered suits that bend gravity and rip holes in reality on a whim. Floaty bits and black holes, that's what that means for my designs, eco and fabrication units will have black hole looking things and everything will have floaty bits, many structures wont actually touch the ground. Arty creature is an older design from before Christmas. The only actual model kinda sucks because I tried too hard to simplify its shell in the concept stage and it, get this, didn't have enough information to be easily modeled. Don't plan on finishing it, in hindsight i should just alter the current factory.. jaws look cool tho Big one's my plan for a commander, the whole body will rotate like a turret while the legs do their own thing, I think it'll look pretty sweet if my modelling skills are up for it.
redesigned the basic factory again, tried to free-hand model it as opposed to working from a profile and front view, finally up to my standards. Allowing myself floaty limbs gave me a lot of freedom and allowed me to get this guy down to 1374 tris.
I had a second idea for a faction around 2015. They would play very similarly to mla but with swarms of units and powerful artillery and tactical options like a cross between imperial guard and sc2 terran in gameplay terms. I actually want to make these guys into a real mod at some point in the distant future. I'll make a full thread about them when I finish this commander, one factory and one unit. it'll be a while yet cuz i'm doing lots of other stuff but I'm trying to actually post art that I do online now instead of hording it all to myself. Yes. I am teasing you with a robot midriff..
