Forgot to ask Question 3...

3) Just what is a good/max number of polys to have in Freelancer?

Thanks!

im not very experienced in that area.....

u r trying to import the ship from descent???!!!

that is cool!!

sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me!

I'm at work at the moment so I don't have screenshots to show... but you can get the model off of www.descent2.com if you wanna see it.

I love that little ship..

I hear that 5000 polys is a good size...I've had a ship with 12000 polys and it still worked with no problems whatsoever. I wouldn't recommend letting npcs pilot that detailed of a ship though; if they're in a squad, might really drag down visual performance.

I'll double check this number when I can but I think 3dsmax said there were about 25,000+ faces. Which is obviously excessive detail for Freelancer.

Some of the detail on the model I have can be removed... for example: the Missles on the tail fins can be replaced with hardpoints, the jump drive prototype can also be taken out, and the guns need to be shortened and designed to use hardpoints instead of the gun ports that were in the game.

Now if someone knew how to unite all the seperate objects into one peice, that would help also.... (hint..hint)

uniting objects: Yes, you do a boolean add on them, but I work with Truespace and only know how to do booleans in Truespace.

There is a MULTIRES function somewhere in 3dsmax look for them. it can reduce the polycounts of your ship. A warning though I tried this in slipstream. It actually or should i say automatically weld itself to the nearest geometry and thus resulting to lower polygon count.

Hope this helps...


Working hard to earn... but too lazy to do something...

Use optimize ! It's in the modifiers section...

I'd say optimize is the way to go but dont depend on or overdo it.

I'd go for manual cleanning...yeah it a long boring work but it ALWAYS provides the best results.

Tips (some tips are not only for optimizing a model but also for error checkking):
*Delete faces that NEVER show up cuz they are hidden behind other faces.
*Simplify via optimize or collapse, the areas which will never show great detail cuz they are partially hidden by other surfaces.
*Manually simplify those minute details that would look good on a rendered video, but will never be that noticeable in a 3d game. Trust a good texture for this.
*Sometimes during extrude, if the verts where not welded you may get useless faces and verts as well... like a square surface with 4 squares(8 faces), assume the 2 upper square's bottom verts are not welded to the lower square's upper verts... when you extrude instead of becoming a cube, it will actually make 2 cubes meanning that the lower squares will create a top side and the upper squares a bottom side meaning that you'll get 4 extra faces (2 for each of the unnecessary surfaces). Get rid of them.
*If you do multiple mirrors watch it... use the mirror modifier with the selected meshes and not the mirror button on the toolbar as it will mirror EVERYTHING and you'll get duplicated overlapping surfaces (talk about having twice as much vertices as you would normally get).
*If you used mirror, the model is split right down the middle usually from the front to the back... if it's possible, like the topside being a flat surface and that split line isn't actually necessary, get rid of it making the left side connect to the right side without that split line in the middle.
*The last tip's principle applies to other situations... whenever there's a falt surface like the top of a 10 sided cylinder... notice that when you build the cylinder it will have a vert right in the center and you'll get 10 triangles to the sides. If you delete the vert at the center and create the faces one side to the other you'll save 2 faces, cuz the concentrical scheme will need 10 faces while the non-concentrical scheme will only need 8 faces.

Well... if I didn't boggled anyone's mind (sometimes i extend the comment longer than i should) I trust my info is pretty accurate and will help you if you are willing to go through the trouble.

I'm a fan of manually optimizing cuz when I made my boba fett model I used optimize and the wiremesh scheme was way off making the model quite chaotic. Well it still looked the same as before when you hid the lines... but i went from a pretty neat and ordered wiremesh to a totally chaotic one, and i wonder if the number of verts i reduced where worth it. Editing that model afterward became harder as well cuz I couldn't rely on simmetry cuz the model (in terms of lines) was NOT simmetrical anymore.

Well that concludes my epic novel version of a reply.

Hope I've been helpful.

Cheers.

Thanks everyone for the great responses! I was on vacation, but I'm back now and was suprised to see so many replies! I'll see what I can do with all of these tips...

A Very big thanks to BloodRiot for taking the time to put all that juicy info up here.. I will surely take in consideration all that you have posted.

Hopefully something as simple as Multires or Optimize will work, but I have a feeling that I'm going to have to manually edit this thing... >_<

If anyone else has suggestions, feel free to let us all know...

Back to the grind...

you can have 12000 polys?!?!?!man...ive been going on the wrong track...ive got a couple that are 200....i gotta start making 1000000000000 poly ships

btw, i heard that 3000 is a good count...
im making toast

Edited by - parabolix on 25-08-2003 20:16:15

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you can have 12000 polys

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Yeah, but I'd be real careful with them. Theoretically, it should have the effect of having 5 npc ships in your view at all times. I haven't tried to push this far.

I"m going to get as close to 6000 as possible. Maybe later I can reduce it further if the performance is too sluggish.

I can see it now:

Required Hardware to fly this ship:
geForceFX 5900 Ultra
Pentium 25 560.33GHz
200GB RAM...

Well, for those who care and are interested in this mod that I am attempting to make, here is an update...

My update is that I am not very good at modeling...

If anyone out there can take a pre-made model and can boolean everything together to make it 1 object and get the poly count down low enough without killing the model, email me. This may take a few minutes for someone that knows how, but I've tried for a few hours with no luck...

I can get the poly count down to like 12,000, which of course is still too much, but when I import it into Milkshape, the different peices of the model seem to be randomly placed and not where they should be.

I'm looking for some help to get this model fixed and imported into Milkshape where I will have a go at the texturing and placement of hardpoints. I'm not looking for a free ride or someone else to do all the work for me, just someone to get the darn thing into Milkshape so I can make some progress.

Thanks...