[Akalabeth Angel]

    Does anyone know if its possible to use Maya or, some other program (they usually have most of the same functions anyway) to basically increase the volume of an object? Basically I want to make a duplicate of a model but have it slightly larger in every direction so that the first object could fit inside the previous.


     And no, before any helpful teenage noobs chip in their two cents, scaling won't work. Scaling will just make the object bigger which if it were a sphere or a cube, would work, but if you had a ship like a Tie Fighter for example the Foil/Wings would crash through eachother, etcetera and so on. (A Good analogy is, if you have a letter H in type 10 font, scaling would be like increasing the font size to 12. But what I want is to make it Bold, or fatter. So a normal H would fit inside the bold H without one or the other crashing through eachother.

[Talon 1024]

In Wings3D:

- Select all verts
- Move -> Normal

[Akalabeth Angel]

In Wings3D:

- Select all verts
- Move -> Normal

      Yeah that should actually work too in Maya, I'm so used to using world co-ordinates I forgot that everything has it's own little thing. On another board they suggested just extruding the faces along the normal as well, that should work.

        And here I was thinking of having to move every little polygon out a little bit. Man, good thing I asked.

[Galemp]

There's a modifier called 'Push' that does this in 3DS Max.

[0rph3u5]

anyway to do so in Blender?

[Vasudan Admiral]

Alt+S looks like it does what you want.

[Akalabeth Angel]

         Hmmn, I think I might forego my idea anyway.
         But on a related topic, what's the acceptable limit for the number of polygons for a fighter? Is it actually 6000? (UV Mapped). In conversation about the Colossus that someone was bringing out the Wiki limit for the Juggernaut was thrown out the window. I'm working on a model right now and while I don't intend to get anywhere near 6000 I'm already at like, 2500 with some fairly curvy surfaces still to come.

[Vasudan Admiral]

The 'limits' are just guidelines where if you breach them, you've probably not spent your polys as wisely as you could have.

They really honestly are not 'if you exceed this count it will not work' limits at all, though I have seen a lot of people treat them that way. :\

[Akalabeth Angel]

The 'limits' are just guidelines where if you breach them, you've probably not spent your polys as wisely as you could have.

        Hmmn, it's possible.
        Here's a general question, how many points in a circle? The craft I'm doing I've used 16 point circles, I dunno if that's too much compared to what other people typically do (I know it's far and above what Freespace2 does). By 16 point circles I mean NWES, split once, and split again.

[Vasudan Admiral]

That depends on where you're using it. For small pipes or guns I use hexagonal or pentagonal tubes, but for bigger stuff it might go up to 20 or so.

[Akalabeth Angel]

That depends on where you're using it. For small pipes or guns I use hexagonal or pentagonal tubes, but for bigger stuff it might go up to 20 or so.

       Hmmn, I used it for the little guns. Haha. First  they're big, then they taper in, then go out a bit, then expand, elongate and finally the hole recesses. So I think the guns are probably a couple hundred polys on my model on their own. Oh well.

[Galemp]

For reference, the Karnak is over 25k polies, but it's huge, it's round, it's hollow, there's only ever one at a time, and it only uses a single texture map.

The number of sides on a cylinder is really based on how close you're ultimately going to get to it. On fighter guns 8 is generally a good number, though if they're really prominent you could go as high as 12. I find 6 to be too obviously hexagonal. You can also improve the illusion of smoothness by twisting the top or bottom of the cylinder so that all the sides are triangles instead of quads.

Anything larger, and it depends on how much real estate on the screen the model is eventually gonna end up taking. Big ship turrets are fine with 8 or 12 sides, but hull geometry generally needs more.