Mon Mar 07, 2005 5:13 pm by Argh
@windjackal:
While every developer's going to reach different conclusions about these sorts of things... our mod's target for fighters, which are on the screen a lot, is 3000 or less, period. You can do a lot with 3000- plenty of complex curvature, etc. that looks decent.
@PantherX:
Models with more than 8,000 polys are currently impossible, if I recall correctly- the only CMP exporter we have, which was designed for MS3D, cannot do larger polycounts (this is apparantly because previous versions of MS3D couldn't handle such complex objects). As a 3D artist... I think that if you need more than 8,000 polys... it'd better be something very, very large and very, very complex, that players see ONE of on the screen at a time, or... don't build it. People who use more than 5,000 on a fighter are either really lazy or inexperienced.
The other critical problem, which often gets ignored by modelers, is texture memory usage. People often texture their models with multiple DDS/TGA textures of 256X256 and up, instead of skinning their entire model with one UV-mapped texture. DA did use a lot've multitexturing, but they also re-used their textures all the time- the same textures show up on lots of different ships, stations and other objects. I try make every ship in our mod use a single 1024X1024 DDS (for a very detailed, large object) down all the way to 128X128 (for objects like weapon models, where you can often get away with a very low-rez).
@DTX:
I'm not sure I agree about there being a lot've wasted polys in FL's modeling. Have you looked at them with the CMP importer in MS3D?
The "base" models (i.e., the first LOD, or highest-detail meshes) actually are pretty efficiently modeled, I think. If you look at the polycount on, say, the Bretonian fighter's first LOD, it's 1525 polys... pretty darn nice, for something with that much complex curvature. But when looking at the fighters... I can't say that I see a lot've areas that could've been better-optimized. It's clear that DA went over every bit of those ships with a very firm goal to keep under 1500 polys.
Now, 1500 is a bit low to get really smooth curves, even with welding to take some of the obvious edges away, and the FL ships do have some areas of curvature where they're distinctly boxy by today's standards. But they're very efficient, imho, and make very good use of single-skin technique.
Could they be better? Yes, there are a few areas where they could've been better- if the modelers hadn't had to worry about the fact that parts of FL ships have to be able to break off when damaged. Those are the main areas that aren't perfectly efficient... but one can understand the tradeoffs involved there.
.