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N8rush10 : Not bad, but there's a few issues aside from the eyes mentioned already. He's got fish lips, soften off the lower edge of the bottom lip near the corners. The change in skin colour is not a harsh change in direction, a lot of people make this mistake.

Get some (better?) reference for the nose. The nostrils don't terminate straight into the face like that. The nose in general could do with a bit more work.

A tip for presentation : don't render on a black background. A neutral 70%-ish grey looks better, at least as a starting point.

I found a (long-winded) way to export/import with Maya, if that's any use to you. It's also possible to use Gmax, although it'll be a big step back from max 9 for you. You could still do most of the work in Max, export as OBJ or 3DS and put up with rigging in Gmax.

You're a lucky sod btw. We have to do all our own exporting at our place, amongst other techy nonsense. I with I had an export monkey to do that stuff for me.

Best not to rely on 2-sided materials. Duplicate the feather and then reverse its normals in Max. To do that, select the mesh, create a "normal modifier", and tick the box that says "flip".

It also looks like you have a ton of bad geometry there where you bridged the sphere and the torus together. An edge should only ever have a maximum of two faces sharing it. Any more and it becomes "non-manifold", ie. bad geometry. You'll get bad lighting artifacts around that area in many game engines, if the engine will accept it at all.

Just a future tip for displaying wireframes....display a shaded model with the wires from several angles, rather than just the wires themselves. It's a lot easier to "read" the mesh if you're looking for comments and criticism. See yellowmosquito's building on the previous page for a good example.

I can see plenty of hard edges.....

About LODs, I think as long as you name it correctly (as you mentioned), it should recognise the naming convention and automatically swap the model at the correct distance.

If I were you, I'd start with something simple like a helmet which doesn't require any rigging or vertex animation. Once you've successfully got something into the game then you could start to look at some more complex things.

Sketch-up .objs often need a lot of cleanup to make them useable in a game. Still, it's a nice little tool for visualisation.

Sorry man, but I'm mainly a Maya user and not a big fan of Max's envelope sytem. Paint weights all the way baby

I normally prefer to start with a "clean" base of 100% weights assigned to the nearest (or most sensible) joint, then I start to fine tune it either by painting weights or selecting verts and manually assigning weight values. It sounds finicky, but you have a lot of control and most game models are low-poly enough not to make this job too arduous.

MD3 files are meshes that have vertex animation. M&B uses them for several things, such as hands and quivers.

SMD files are meshes that are rigged and contain vertex weighting and skeleton data. M&B uses these mainly for torso armour (including thighs and arms) and horses.

LoD stands for "Level of Detail". These meshes are swapped in for the higher-poly version when the model is further from the camera and small details won't be noticed. They make the game run more efficiently.

Hope that helps a bit.

Some tips for assigning weights for M&B :

If you're getting spikey bits or weird distortion, you've probably got weights assigned to knees, feet, hands or neck which it doesn't seem to like. Try assigning 100% weights to just the body, hips, shoulders and elbows and then export. If all's well you can fine tune the weighting from there.

No, these days texture sizes, number of textures and complex materials tend to have more of hit than raw polycount. Still, keeping within a reasonable count is advisable. Make LODs where appropriate too. It's a tedious job, but it'll help your mod run well on lower spec machines.

Jlgx50 said:

Ok I might be wrong, half life 2 can support up to 4000 pollys per model

but your telling me a sword that has 8000 Pollys works in M&B

dont take this the wrong way but i think you mean 800

8000 pollys for a sword times that by how ever many men you have in your party, I'm sory to say it man but I just can;t belive that, the game would eather Crash or lag like you wouldn't belive   

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Half-Life can support WAY more polygons than 4000. Alyx from HL2 is over 8000 polys. You could do a lot more than that if you wanted, but obviously there's a trade-off with efficiency.

M&B  has some pretty conservative polycounts in native. There's definitely quite a lot of room for maneuvre, although I wouldn't be giving everyone 8000 poly swords  as a general rule

If I remember right, the polycount for a full M&B model (head, armour etc.etc.) was somewhere in the region of 2500-ish polys, dependant on what armour it was wearing. Bear in mind, all the stock models also have LoD models (Level of Detail models - lower polycount versions which are swapped for the higher ones when further from the camera).

You could easily double this figure on decent hardware (I can play comfortably with around 300 characters in game using the battle sizer mod).

Quads are turned into triangles on export. The only reason to use them is to make the model easier to work with.

Photoshop along with the Nvidia dds plugins will do it, although not everyone has photoshop. I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that The GIMP (photoshop style freeware) would be able to as well. By "makes changes to dds", I'm assuming you want to edit some textures, right?

Irish mythological might be a good one. Tir Nan Og, Cu-Culainne, Balor of the Evil Eye etc.

Stewart said:

Hi all - New here, trying to get Wings3D down.

Followed some cool vid tuts and came out with this-still unsure about texturing though. I posted this on another site, and I was told I needed to do some poly cleanup - How would this be done?

Thanks

Click to expand...

You could maybe try something like this :



This is obviously simplified a bit, you could easily add a bit more curve to the spiky bits on the back of the sword to make it closer to your original. Please note, you DO NOT NEED to avoid using triangles.

You can export the body mesh as an .OBJ file and edit it in wings. It defaults to .SMD when exporting from BRF edit, which wings doesn't support AFAIK. However, you won't be able to get the mesh back into the game using only wings as it needs to be rigged and wings has no anaimation/rigging tools. You'll need 3D Studio Max, Maya or another 3D program which has SMD plugins for import/export to do that.

I think Demize2020 found some hacky way around it for the Undying Lands mod. I'll see him tomorrow and ask him.

Highelf : looking good man, you've really improved since you made those tutorials. It still seems that you're unneccessarily avoiding using triangles anywhere though. I think that people pick up the idea that triangles = bad from subdivision modelling where quads are generally better since they subdivide predictably. Even that is flawed in some ways though, since it's "poles" (vertices with greater or less than four edges leading from them) which need to be carefully placed in a subdivision model.

Having said that, most of the topology looks good and efficient already.  Any chance of a wireframe of the main model and not just the armour?