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Model Guidelines

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 5:37 am
by pheonixstorm
Although its on the wiki, the information about what is acceptable for models and textures is scattered about the forums. To help new artists as they appear this thread will hold a repository of useful information and linkes. The first being the link for the model development Wiki page.

Quick peak, models should be of the following sizes:
Rough guideline:
  • Fighter: 15k triangles
  • Corvette: 30k tris
  • Cruiserer: 60k
  • Carrier: 120k
  • Space station: 250k
One topic to pay attention to: Please stop overlapping islands in UV unwraps
Wiki page on shaders: HowTo:IntroToShaders
Texturing Wiki: HowTo:SuperrealisticTexturing
Agood tutorial at the parallel universe forums: After modeling a ship... What to do?

There's actually a lot of good material over at the wcjunction forums: http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=49

A note about any wiki links you find on the forums here. There are more than likely out of date. With the move all wiki links should point to http://wiki.vega-strike.org and not http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/

If anyone finds a useful thread give a little detail and post a link here. Any questions, see THIS thread and someone should be able to provide an answer.

Re: Model Guidelines

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2012 5:54 am
by klauss
I would like to clarify that none of those vertex count work without LODs. Those counts are for top-level models, but a few lower-poly models down to 1k should be provided, both for lower-end GPUs and for drawing at a distance.

Re: Model Guidelines

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 1:33 pm
by pheonixstorm
Also, models should provide the base unit mesh, a shield mesh, and preferably a collision mesh.

The unit mesh should follow the above rules.
The shield mesh should be the same basic shape of the unit mesh though not as detailed, and only need a single texture. You can probably reuse the shield texture used somewhere in masters (I have seen one just dont remember where).
The collision mesh should be very basic. Several rectangles or a very primitive form of the unit mesh (unless we can use the lowest poly LOD for this).

Re: Model Guidelines

Posted: Mon Dec 03, 2012 3:29 pm
by klauss
pheonixstorm wrote:The collision mesh should be very basic. Several rectangles or a very primitive form of the unit mesh (unless we can use the lowest poly LOD for this).
It doesn't need to be that basic, opcode is quite efficient in mesh collisions.

It just needs to be as simple as possible while retaining the overall shape, and must always be contained by the unit mesh (so people don't bump into invisible lines)