hell

[krazycolin]

so here i am with a dilemma... i'm sure this happens often... it's just never happened to me.

i've got a bunch of super high rez models... and they all need to be dumbed down to low rez....

suggestions? help? methods?

thanks!!!!

[kweetnix]

I've been modeling low poly aircraft for ten years now and learned to start from scratch; way quicker (box modeling, extruded splines, lofts) and it gives better results than fiddling with optimize modifiers or polygon reduction software. Just use the high res mesh as a template.

gh

[dangreve]

http://www.sim.no/products/RR/app/

[krazycolin]

thanks guys.

[hangfire]

Im a bit offended that you refer to low poly modeling as dumbing down as opposed to hi res. In my opinion it is easier and takes less thought to come up with a super high poly mesh for a model. Also as game engines support higher and higher poly counts, the difference between what is low poly and high poly is less obvious, as can be seen on bzhyoyo's SE5a WIP thead: http://www.military-meshes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=262

You didnt indicate what your poly budget is, so its hard to give you advice on how to go about making your model. But I can give you some quick pointers for game models. Here is a model I did of a Sabre that comes in under 2500 polys triangulated:
http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/2546/clipboard012uz6zp1.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Usually you will start out by making the fuselage with a cylinder primitive. For this model I chose 24 segments for the cylinder. Its important not to go too cheap on picking number of segments because just a couple of polys less can mean the difference between looking smooth and looking facey. You'll notice I put in a lot of segments in the landing gear wheels. Nothing looks worse than an 8 sided wheel. Dont go cheap where detail counts. Look at these two torus, the one on the left has 16 segments, the one on the right has 14. Just two extra segments makes one look rounded and the other flat sided:
http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/7835/torusyc2.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

I also used a cylinder to make the landing gear strut, not a square. This model is for a Battlefield 1942 mod, so people can see it up close in game.

[Skyraider3D]

Want something quick? Multires! :D It ain't pretty.
Want something good? Start stripping out edge loops (Meshtools is your friend here > http://www.scriptspot.com). It ain't fun...
Want something good and fun? Build from scratch. It ain't fast :)
Dilemmas indeed.

Hangfire's got a valid point, by the way. Low-poly stuff does take some planning and careful tweaking to match your budget.


PS. Hangfire, on your Sabre model you might want to keep the air intake as edge loops. They will cost only a few extra polygons, but the mesh layout will be better for the game to render (tri-stripping (http://www.bluevoid.com/opengl/sig00/advanced00/notes/node19.html)) and it will look nicer.