[Omniscaper]

Finally someone who understands where I'm coming from. Thank you. Maybe I could have just said what you said and avoided all drama.

[magatsu1]

No drama intended. I just thought you took Karma's reply a little personal.

[Omniscaper]

ITs been brewing for awhile now. When pigeons peck at your toes long enough, you tend to kick it. =)

...time top get back to work on my 11K version of the HercII. 11k 11k 11k. With 4096x4096 textures.

[Omniscaper]

BTW, does anyone know a good tutorial to read on texture baking? This model has 35 seperate textures that I believe can be squeezed into 5. I know how to bake textures in Lightwave, but 3dsmax and Truespace is a mystery to me. Using 5 textures is bound to improve performance.

[Nico]

Originally posted by Bobboau
all those "useless" polys give the model vastly superior lighting, specular lighting likes lots and lots of verts to sample. if this was redone useing 3000 polys it's lighting would be about 1/20th as good

but that's an engine pb, a flat thing is a flat thing, no matter how many times you subdivise it, a plane is still a plane, and so, the ligthing shouldn't change. That's a code flaw which definitively goes against mesh optimisation.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
A technical judgement on what basis? He never tried it in game yet has he? He bases his OPINION on 4 screenshots. Now if this model crashes Freespace or impacts performance to 3 fps, then its justified. It hasn't crashed freespace, it runs pretty well with 10 models on screen, and games of a next generation are using them ( Bridge Commander).
 

It's just based on the picture and the wireframe... it is a fair judgement in my opinion, cos I agree - the model could be a lot less polys and still look the same.  I'd imagine you'll understand what he (and I) mean when you LOD it, anyways.

You should take it as a compliment, anyways - the  better you get at stuff around here the more people nitpick at it.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
BTW, does anyone know a good tutorial to read on texture baking? This model has 35 seperate textures that I believe can be squeezed into 5. I know how to bake textures in Lightwave, but 3dsmax and Truespace is a mystery to me. Using 5 textures is bound to improve performance.

No idea. How do you bake textures in Lightwave?

[Omniscaper]

In the modeler, have the object you want to bake isolated in its own layer. Press the "T" in the bottom right. CLick new. Pick "atlas" in the dropdown selection. It will unwrap the mesh. You can see it unwrapped when you switch to UV view.

Open layout. Go to surface editor. Under shaders add "surface baker" Go to its properties and choose the UV map you created in the modeler. Pick which shading style you want baked: Diffuse, color, illumination, or other. Give the map a name and choose its size and just hit render.

At that point you can replace the object's texture with your new map using the same UV coordinates made in modeler.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
BTW, does anyone know a good tutorial to read on texture baking? This model has 35 seperate textures that I believe can be squeezed into 5. I know how to bake textures in Lightwave, but 3dsmax and Truespace is a mystery to me. Using 5 textures is bound to improve performance.

Um.... to be honest, I tend to UV the thing before I texture it, so not sure.  The UVUnwrapper could be handy, but you'd have to assemble the textures into a single file and map them back on.

[Nico]

in max, you go to the render menu ( top bar, the usual windows top bar, not some max toolbar ), render to texture, and then fiddle with the options to your liking.
Oh, and set up the lightning beforehand, coz it'll be taken into account.
best choice is probably to switch to light tracer and drop a sky dome light in the scene.
You'll get only one map, tho.

edit: oh, yeah, can't do it with max older than max5.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
In the modeler, have the object you want to bake isolated in its own layer. Press the "T" in the bottom right. CLick new. Pick "atlas" in the dropdown selection. It will unwrap the mesh. You can see it unwrapped when you switch to UV view.

Open layout. Go to surface editor. Under shaders add "surface baker" Go to its properties and choose the UV map you created in the modeler. Pick which shading style you want baked: Diffuse, color, illumination, or other. Give the map a name and choose its size and just hit render.

At that point you can replace the object's texture with your new map using the same UV coordinates made in modeler.

Thanks. I'll have to give that a try