[Grimloq]

After receiving more than one PM on this subject, I thought I should set your fears to rest-

The hi-poly Hecate is NOT forgotten. It's coming along slowly but steadily. Right now I'm spending a great deal of time optimizing it and fixing the huge amount of intersecting polies I had... At the time I didn't know they were bad. I would put up pictures, but there aren't many noticeable changes - mostly just said optimizations. At the moment, I believe the polycount is somewheres around 4000 or 5000, including turrets (Which I am working on making perdier).

The main thing that was holding me back was the fact that my 3D card was SO old and SO crappy that, when working on the Hecate, trueSpace ran at a speed comperable to that of a slideshow

[edit]Oh, yes, the point of that paragraph was to say that I have a new 3D card now, a nice one ^_^ ATI Xtasy 9600 256MB, got it for 130$. Not exactly top-of-the-line, but it was a good buy.[/edit]

So... Yeah... >_> Not much to say, except it's not forgotten.

Besides that, I've taken to using proper punctuation when typing now Yesss...

OK... So... Yeah... >_>

Quit PMing me about this! I'm workin', I'M WORKIN'!

[KARMA]

intersections aren't bad.
well, not THAT bad at least:p

[Grimloq]

They make texturing a royal PITA, at least

Can someone tell me exactly WHY intersecting polies are bad?

[KARMA]

aehm, actually they make texturing easyer;)

intersections are bad just because sometimes the *MAY* make you model unstable and crash the game and some other times the *MAY* confuse the converters which will make your model non solid (you'll fly through the ship).
On the other hand they'll reduce the pcount and make texturing easyer, since the model will be sliced in pieces which can be textured independentaly.
Yeah, it's better to don't exagerate with intersections, and you have to avoid some weirdness like multiple edges sharing the same coordinates in space, but the can be very useful sometimes.

[Grimloq]

Hmm... ok, I didn't know that... Maybe I can get away with a couple, then.

[StratComm]

They do goof up collisions a tad, but overall that's not the concern.  Really the only issue there is that most objects in game are outward-normal only and having faces only visible from inside the volume may confuse some obscure functions.  Primarily it is a rendering issue; intersecting polys don't always clip 100% accurately and so they may make the model look off.  A few intersecting places where the surface your working with doesn't greeble well are fine; using them whenever you're adding a hull component is not reliable enough to rely on it.  Clipping isn't nearly as bad as it once was, and I haven't seen model geometry crash FS2 in a long time, but you might overrun the BSP generation code and get a retarded fly-through ship if you've got too many polys at the same general location.

EDIT: Non-intersecting geometry is actually more of a general CGI considereation than specific to freespace at this point; it's just widely considered bad practice.  Specifically in an environment in which polygons can exist non-triangulated, intersecting faces have an ambiguity in exactly where the intersection takes place, and that inconsistancy is bad.  For what you were using them for on your Raynor, they were by and large fine.  They tend to work better over sharp angles than they do when nearly flush with the surface they are intersecting, and the Raynor has some issues with that, but overall it's not a problem.

EDIT2: And they are bad for custom mapping, since it's hard to tell what point on the map gets covered up.

[Grimloq]

@ Edit #2: That's what I meant, KARMA.

As for the Raynor, I hadn't gotten around to optimizing that yet... I was going to, but you beat me to it

Hmm... I might be able to get away with a great deal of this, then. There wasn't a whole lot of intersections, but the few that were there were quite large. I'll look into this...

[KARMA]

obviously, a solid model will always work better, and at least witrh a solid model you are always sure about the final result.
Nonetheless, sometimes intersection are pretty useful in my opinion, expecially when you need to keep under control the polycout.
IIRC, the fenris without intersections would have been over 12k, when she's "only" around 7k.
I guess it's a matter of balancing gains and losses.

And of course using intersections is a bad practice in any branch of CGI compared to making solid models. Nonetheless 99% of the non pro high poly models (like those on swma, for example) use an heavy amount of intersections

[KARMA]

oh, and about custom mapping, it's just a matter of unwrapping, if you use the same uv projection over the intersection, you save the exact position of the edge. Yeah, you can't do that always, but again it's a gain/loss balance...and having a mesh splitted in pieces can make it many times easyer to select the different faces that having various k of polys to deal with at the same time

[aldo_14]

I'm still old fashioned and always box model the entire ship (pretty much; no intersections, everything welded and matched up).

For me,  anything that intersects the hull, is stuff used as a destroyable part of the ship.

[Taristin]

I, too, only make my meshes from a single cube. I can't seem to grasp doing it any other way.

[Kie99]

So umm what about the Parthenon and Irathinak?

*runs*

[Grimloq]

Don't make me come over there...