Poly Count Problem

# 1 09-07-2003 , 04:49 PM

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I recently joined a mod team for a game and am required to design military tanks around 3000 polys. I'm doing just fine except for the fact that the poly count goes way up when I triangulate. (as some of you know, polygonal faces must be triangles only in games) I'm not entirely sure how many polys I should put into the tank treads and wheels. The image below shows what I have. Before triangulation is 803 faces, after triangulation is 1760 faces. Obviously, I need to duplicate this because a tank has two treads, so this poly count is WAY too big.

I'm doing the treads as a bunch of cubes. 85 cubes to be precise. Should I be modeling the treads differently? If I do, I'm not entirely sure how the others guys would animate it. In Maya, all you have to do it parent them to a curve, then do some lattice work and boom, you've got a moving tread, but I doubt they'll be able to do this.

Perhaps I need to model the treads as one big object? Take a cube and extrude it around the wheels maybe? then hope the animators can take that and animate it somehow?

Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated. Mostly, I just need to know how many polys for the treads and I'll see what I can do with the rest. Thanks in advance.

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# 2 09-07-2003 , 05:04 PM

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in most games that I've seen tanks in, they use an animated texture to simulate the treads moving... so, the tread itself is actualy just a big oval piece. that doesn't really move on its own volition.

Once you get the main body of the tank done, you'd have a good idea how many polys are left to afford to the treads. Don't be afraid to sacrifice detail... that's the name of the game when it comes to game modeling. Trying to get a good ratio of geometry : detail can be tough.

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-Mike
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# 3 09-07-2003 , 05:40 PM

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LOL @ mike that's great.

Poly counts are the bane of all mod making. This guy

https://www.volny.cz/marfyart/desertofp/index_engl.htm

is working on some great WW2 tank mods for Op Flashpoint and has done some good tutorials (the Zimmerit one is a classic and there is a wheels one as well).

You can see from the screens that his tracks are textured whole shapes- low poly work tends to rely on textures, not modelling, to bring out the detail.

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# 4 09-07-2003 , 06:43 PM

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Thanks you two. I redid it and have gotten it down to 900 polys. I'm thinking that I can reduce the number of subdivisions around the axis. First, it was 15, then I reduced it to 13. Anything lower will cause the normals on the face to align in such a way that the smoothness is reduced too much. The actual tread is exactly 100 faces, which is good I suppose. I think I'll model the rest of the tank and see how far I can get with 1000 polys. If I need more, I'll redeuce the subdivisions of the cylinders. Once again, thanks for your help.

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# 5 10-07-2003 , 03:19 AM

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Ok, I have a small technical problem now. I'm pretty much done with the entire tank, but the guy I'm working for tells me the player will be able to step inside the tank and drive it. I am modeling this tank: https://www.wwiivehicles.com/images/b...romwell_04.jpg and as you can see, there is no window for a person to look out. He has a vision of a small window being placed directly to the right or left of where the barrel meets the head of the tank. It is quite possible that the driver looked through the small circular placement to the left of the small gun terrent below the main barrel. Obviously, looking through such a small hole would be annoying in a game.

SOOooooo, I have several possibilities here. I can either go Goldeneye style and have the player just sit inside the head like Bond does in the N64 game, create an unrealistic window for the player to look out of while inside the tank, or not even do an inside thing and have the player drive the tank in third person view. (viewing the entire tank)

The guy I'm working for rarely has a chance to talk to me, so I can't really ask him these sort of things. In the teaser trailer for HL2 it did show the player viewing everything from a small window, but there is a possibility that they wouldn't even include the tank I'm modeling in the game because it has no window to view things through from inside.

What should I do?!

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# 6 10-07-2003 , 04:09 AM

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In Battlefield 1942, when you take control of a tank you don't actually see the "real" tank model in your view. They made a seperate UI display that the player sees, while everyoen else sees the actual tank driving around.

That would be the best way to do it in my opinion.

-Mike
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# 7 10-07-2003 , 05:10 AM

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Yes, you see it that way, but I'm not certain it's a seperate UI display. I've looked at images on Google for that game, so I know what you're talking about. One thing that might be a problem is that the programmers might not know how to do a seperate UI display. I'm not sure how advanced these people are or if the SDK will even allow it. I just have no clue. I'll see what the guy who hired me says though.

Creating a seperate display would work fantastically though because it eliminates me having to design the interior of the tank. If the player was shown actually openning the hatch, climbing down, and sitting in front of the window, I'd have to boolean a cylinder into the head, booleans a cylinder into the tank base, then create a whole room inside because it would have to be a different texture than the outside texture obviuously.

Great thinking Mike. Let's hope it works.

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# 8 10-07-2003 , 06:00 PM

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Ok, I have the oval-like treads, but now he says they're too smooth. He wants the bumpy things on there so it looks realistic. #1 this will make the poly count go way up. #2 how the hell is he supposed to properly animate it? I'll do whatever he wants, but should I force him to do it my way for his own good? This could cause problems in the future and cause me to have more modeling to do. I think he's one of those people who wants it to look cool, yet have a low poly count at the same time, and doesn't really understand the in's and out's of animation like I do. I'm confused at what I should do. user added image

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# 9 10-07-2003 , 06:37 PM

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you might want to tell him to look into normal mapping (game equivalent of bump mapping).

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# 10 11-07-2003 , 01:19 AM

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There is actually a window for the driver (or, if you think about it it would have been a bit hard to drive it!)- the Cromwell had a driver vision setup similar to the Churchill with a thick glass plate set into a circular frame (plus periscopes for wider views). This site has some good illustrations of the interior and the various crew positions including the driver's and shows the driver's view;

https://www.kithobbyist.com/AFVInteriors/crom/crom.html

Depends on the degree of realism you are going for- in Op Flash they model the 'heads out' and 'interior' drivers views where applicable, according to the model of the actual vehicle. But it depends on your audience. In realistic games one of the issues in driving tanks is coping with the restricted vision of different models etc. But being an armour freak I would say that 8).

Last edited by Witchy; 11-07-2003 at 01:22 AM.

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# 11 11-07-2003 , 03:16 PM

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I guess you wont really be able to know until the Half-Life 2 SDK comes out. So the best bet would be to model a few different ones with different ways of looking out of the tank.

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# 12 14-07-2003 , 11:47 AM

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Hello!

I used to work a few years on computer game models ... there are few things to think about, you won´t be used to from modeling with high-end-maya ...
i modelled in Milkshape that time (veery simply, $20 Program) ... but its good for this type of work.
Because you need to have control over every single polygon, for example: if you have wheels, you won´t use the tops and bottoms of the cylinder, but use rectangular surfaces (2 polygons) with transparency map ... if you model that way all the time (lots of transparency maps) you can save a-lotta-polygons user added image

...
i modelled trains (https://www.bluesky-interactive.com/S...T2/final11.jpg) and they had as well about 3k polygons, with insides ...
hope i was able to help you
ulrich

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