[HotSnoJ]

How hard is it to make LOD's for you modelers out there? I'm fighting myself and Killfrenzy on releaseing a tutorial on make better and faster one.

[Unknown Target]

Where's the I-don't-know-how option?

I never bother, because if you don't have enough power to draw full-detail ships at a distance, well, why d you even buy games?

[HotSnoJ]

Why? cuz games are fun! I bought FS for ten bucks. It was the best ten bucks I ever spent. Heck FS is the best game I ever bought!

Homeworld, I thought would be somewhat like Fs but was I ever wrong!.

[Unknown Target]

Hey! HW was cool!

[HotSnoJ]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Hey! HW was cool!

I was meaning I thought it was like FS in that you can fly your ships. Not a stratagy game.

[karajorma]

Just post the tutorial and stop teasing us about how you know how to do it better

Remember you probably wouldn`t be modding at all if someone hadn`t told you how to do it.

[Galemp]

All I do is take some of the more important parts on my model and join them together. After 2 or 3 of those I end up with a tetrahedron, prism, or octahedron.

[StratComm]

The fact of the matter is, creating LODs is by default easier than making the main model.  I mean how hard is it to reduce detail or, if necessary, drop features or even make a less detailed version of a complex model?  It is really the easiest part of the ship-creation process.

[EdrickV]

Haven't really tried LoDs except in a POF file I made just to test them. It didn't seem too hard at the time. Shields on the other hand were really annoying 'cause during the cob->pof conversion the entire mesh got moved up (+y) quite a bit and ended up with the shield mesh intersecting with the hull. (And this was just a simple donut model.) On the other hand, for fighter type ships Segeltuch can make shield meshes easily, though it doesn't do much else right. (Which means you always make the shields on a disposable copy of the POF and import them into the good one.)

[Bobboau]

the only thing hard about shields is remembering to keep everything centered (and triangulated).
LOD there (all of them together) about the same dificulty to make as the main LOD, extreemly but tidius and boring, even debris is somewhat fun to do, hell I'd rather do paths to a 400 turret super jugernaught than do a full LOD, well ok that streaches it slightly, but makes my point

[Killfrenzy]

Originally posted by HotSnoJ
I'm fighting myself and Killfrenzy on releaseing a tutorial on make better and faster one.

Excuse me??? I'm not sure I understand. I can't do it anyway! I need a tutorial for TS5.1 in order to do that - I can do virtually everything else (apart from 'perfect' UV mapping) so a decent LOD tutorial would be INVALUABLE!!

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
Where's the I-don't-know-how option?

I never bother, because if you don't have enough power to draw full-detail ships at a distance, well, why d you even buy games?

Maybe because it means you can a LOT more ships with less slowdown and no visual effect?  Or, have a reaklly detailed, turreted ship with ****loads of active debris and destroyed objects with vastly reduced CPu use?  (i.e. deimos. Or even that Njord cruiser I made, which was sort of based on the same principle)

Incidentally, LODing is pish easy.  Takes me about half an hour / 45mins tops to weld together the vertices and make the full set of LODs.  Of course, Max does a far better job of preserving the UV than Ts does... (not to mention the smaller map sizes help iron out any problems that do occur)

[mikhael]

LODding is a hell of a lot easier than the original mesh, and its a lot faster too. There's a few exceptions, like when you've got a mesh that's really tightly optimised in the first place. Mostly though, its a <1hr process to get the next three LODs and four layers of debris.

[HotSnoJ]

Shesh can you guys get angry sounding! Well I hope your happy that I'm going to lose the corner on LOD making. Well I shouldn't have kept bragging either.

Well here is the link. Not complete in the sense of not that many images that need to be there. But you MUST have some knowledge of Blender. Some is explained in the tutorial though. And you must do this BEFORE you texture it.

http://planethardwar.com/~hwcomic/FSBlender%20site/tutorail1.html

And for the images that I haven't gotten in yet.

http://planethardwar.com/~hwcomic/FSBlender%20site/images/

And if you got any questions just drop me a line at [email protected]

[Killfrenzy]

And those of us who use trueSpace exlcusively?

[HotSnoJ]

Did I say it was for trueSpace much less any other program when I started to tell people about it? No! I didn't say a word about it. But now that I've released a tutorial I've said what what you use and how you use it.

[yoda voice]Stupid question it was.[/yoda voice]

[Killfrenzy]

If you're going to flame, do it in PM. Not everyone uses blender, for some of us have a little bit of intelligence and save us extra work with model converting or by getting multiple packages to serve the same purpose.....