Hard Light Productions Forums

Community Projects => The FreeSpace Upgrade Project => Topic started by: Hades on August 02, 2007, 08:42:28 am

Title: Manticore
Post by: Hades on August 02, 2007, 08:42:28 am
Does any one have the HTL Manticore?DaBrain posted a link but it doesn't work.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Grizzly on August 06, 2007, 06:30:27 am
Isn't it in the mediavps as well? how old is it?
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Snail on August 06, 2007, 06:35:35 am
It's not in the mediavps.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: jr2 on August 06, 2007, 08:26:17 am
What link did DaB give?
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Cobra on August 06, 2007, 05:45:15 pm
The .cob file for texturing.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: jr2 on August 06, 2007, 07:43:39 pm
I meant I wanted the link.  :p  ;)
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Galemp on August 08, 2007, 04:47:43 am
I had this model and tried to texture it. It looks OK but the geometry is definitely sub-optimal. Anyone wants to give it a shot, here's the model (http://web.njit.edu/~pjo3/htl/manticore.zip) and some of the worse areas.

As an optimization point of reference, if 90% of the time the polygon's going to be smaller than a single pixel, then it's not worth having.

(http://web.njit.edu/~pjo3/htl/mcdet.gif)
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: TrashMan on August 08, 2007, 05:10:32 am
Hm...making those things into separate objects would cut down on the polycount substantially....
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Hades on August 08, 2007, 05:45:00 am
www.game-warden.com/starfox/Non_SF_related_stuff/htl_manticore.rar
That one has the optimized one.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Black Wolf on August 09, 2007, 01:07:31 am
This was Venom/Nico's manticore, right? IIRC, that was made before the SCP, for rendering rather than for ingame use. I would be very surprised if it had been completely optimized.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Rampage on January 18, 2011, 02:03:36 pm
This is a great find; the Inferno Team will now optimize Venom's mesh even further to meet today's standards instead of creating one from scratch.

Zombie-threaded; all updates will be posted here.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Zacam on January 18, 2011, 02:29:54 pm

I approve of this message.

Awesome roll you guy's are on lately.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Rampage on January 18, 2011, 05:07:45 pm
[MESSAGE DELETED]
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Hades on January 18, 2011, 06:53:44 pm
Actually that was DaBrain's Manticore, just fyi.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Rampage on January 18, 2011, 09:12:34 pm
We actually fixed a lot of the geometry errors but had to redo ~80% of both arms' mesh.  As for now, we are taking a break from the Manticore and will finish the Nahema instead.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Rampage on January 19, 2011, 01:31:24 am
Nahema is done; handing it off to FSU team.  We are resuming work on the Manticore, but as a suggestion to HTLers, although all should use his modeling program of preference, we strongly suggest modeling using Wings3D for maximum compatibility with the FS2 engine.  Wings3D does not tolerate meshes that are not closed (eg those w/ holes) and very poorly tolerate intersected polygons - - the very issues that do not sit well w/ FS2.  At Inferno, we use the latest version of Wings3D to HTL all our models.

-INFTeam
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Vasudan Admiral on January 19, 2011, 10:18:30 am
No that's not correct sorry: the FS engine can deal with holes and intersecting polys just fine.
In fact if you have sharp edges displayed in-game on a supposedly closed-mesh model, you're actually looking at holes along those sharp edges. I have not seen exactly what the intolerance to holes looks like in wings, but I do know it's actually quite annoying for me when dealing with models that have come from or are destined for wings. ;)

The basic rule is to keep your geometry clean, and keep intersections relatively shallow (mostly due to wasted texture space). I posted the relatively common geometric errors that can sometimes, (and I must emphasize sometimes) produce faults in-game in the blender to pof page in my sig. For people new to modelling yeah it might be best to avoid holes, but once you know what you're doing and how face and vertex normals relate to the end result, you can do anything your program will let you.
Title: Re: Manticore
Post by: Shivan Hunter on January 19, 2011, 12:09:03 pm
No that's not correct sorry: the FS engine can deal with holes and intersecting polys just fine.

So can Wings. Select a poly and you can 'hide' it, or you can remove it altogether 'hole'. I do it all the time to remove polys that are inside another piece of the mesh and will thus never be seen, and neither Wings nor FS has *****ed about it yet.