Dunkelheit wrote:here is the model without smooth-shading (its not the final one but by now is useful)
and when i set smooth, it looks reallly bad.
So i made some cuts (good to read the HowTo Bevel tutorial) and it looks like this.
![Image](http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/7365/sicklesmoothfl1.png)
Sorry; I'd never seen this thread before. First thing you want to do with just about any mesh object in Blender is Add Attribute -> Edge Split.
Click OFF the From Angle button; leave From Edges Marked Sharp ON.
Then select any edges you want to look sharp and hit Ctrl-E -> Mark Sharp.
When I do, I usually hit Ctrl-E -> Mark Seam, in addition; and also Shift-E 2 Enter, to "crease" the edge.
Reason being, sharp edges often (though not always) are good edges to place seams on, for unwrapping.
And if you use subsurf (and you will, later), you'll need to crease sharp edges to tell subsurf to not smooth too much across them.
So, I usually highlight a whole bunch of edges to sharpen at a time, then hit Ctrl-E->Mark Seam; Ctrl-E->Mark Sharp; and Shft-E 2 Enter, all in quick succession.
my question is if this is really nesecesary in game, to have a good smooth ship, or a bad one, but when it has texture it would be not so bad, because of the great diference in the plygons they have, the first version has around 300, and the other around 1000, so tell me what would be better in game.
Textures can't fix shading artifacts; and 1000 polygons is a joke; 100,000 would be worrisome.
And another question is how to unwrap it, the tutorial of Chuck, is for an old blender i think, my 2.45 doesnt have some options, or matbe named diferent, but i tried so much and dont get to unwrap a simple box
![Confused :?](./images/smilies/icon_confused.gif)
It's true; that tutorial is a bit old; but more or less same principles apply. The newer Blenders no longer have the "Potato Mode", but you work in the same way from the Edit window. You split the screen for a second window, make it a UV Edit type window; then over the Edit window you highlight a bunch of polygons you want to unwrap together, hit U for Unwrap, and most commonly I use Unwrap and Project From View items.
First part of unwrapping is test-unwrapping, to make sure your seams are well placed, and each island unwraps easily, without kinks or overlaps.
Once you've made sure everything is alright, highlight the whole model and hit U -> Unwrap.
Now all the ilsands will be spread randomly in the texture area.
Next step is to do selections by material in the edit window; one at a time:
For each material, group all the islands together in some area outside the square representing the texture area. I start at the bottom left.
Next material, I group them to the left. Next material; upper left.
When done, I have an empty texture area square surrounded by like a pallette of clusters of islands of a common material.
Now optimize each island so that it's tight and square, or rectangular, and so that the direction towards the front of the ship, on each island, points UP in the texture.
Then move all the optimized clusters back into the texture area.
The reason you want to keep similar materials together is to minimize the visibility of color bleeds between islands due to static or dynamic filtering (mipmap generation and trilinear and anisotropic filtering).