Acorn wrote:wow, this is looking really great!
Thanks for that Acorn. Little pats on the back from the community really do mean a lot to me. It lets me know I'm on the right track as I struggle to learn the "art".
Sirius wrote:To create low-poly meshes, remember to use the Decimate modifier. It does an incredibly good job simplifying meshes (although it works best with organic meshes). I always use it for plants and terrain. It might screw up UV mapping though, so beware.
Good reminder! I'll just add a note to this regarding items like the cutlass. In this particular case, I tried both "Optimize" in Max and "Decimate" in Blender and neither gave satisfactory results. What I did find was that the original artist left hundreds of polys
inside the face mesh. I was able to cut over 600 faces from the mesh by getting rid of what wasn't needed.
The various web sites hosting free-to-use models can be great resources to speed up building, but I've found that most of these models aren't designed for real time gaming environments. Along with what has already been mentioned, I've discovered that those models make great templates for building a low poly version of the same thing.
I had downloaded a model that I really liked only to discover that it contained over 400,000 polys and was completely unusable for my purposes. But in studying how it was built, I realized I could duplicate it. I set up the screen to build the duplicate right next to the original and slowly started to rebuild the object bit by bit. With only slight loss of detail, I was able to recreate the object, except mine had less than 4,500 faces. The differences in software packages and building techniques can make a huge difference!