[sandman300]

...

[Techi]

i just leave it on the default that lightwave picks, not sure about the best, most the time it dosnt make a whole load of difference

[sandman300]

Techi: I usually leave it at the defalt when Im working with sub-patch objects, but if you have too much with normal polys then it looks odd. The 1001 tips and tricks book says (tip 465) to set it "just a hair" above the largest angle. thats easy if your working with a regular shape like a sphere but what about an irregular shape? Is there a way to figure that out?

[leroy3rd]

Originally posted by Techi in surface editor, turn smoothing on for the green surface, that will work in games. somthing i dont understand, i read somewere that game engines only accept triangles, and its advisable to only design with triangles when modeling characters, so why can we model in Quads? im not meaning to annoy people, im just interested in all this sort of stuff.

I think ("think"... I may be wrong) that the reason for modeling in tris as opposed quads, is that quads can fairly easily become non-planar, where as tris will ALWAYS remain flat and a single plane. If I'm wrong, someone please let me know!

[Mark]

Leroy, you are pretty much correct. The other reason is that most 3D video cards actually have hardware rendering routines for handling triangles...

[Zeeman]

Yea, such as my video card. It usually says on them that they render "this" many triangles per sec or whatever.

Other than that, Coming along pretty well Sandman!!!

[sandman300]

thanks zeeman, here is my attempt at UV , the way Ive decidid to do this is to map small sections of the object and then later combine them onto one map.

[Mark]

Looking good. Especially like the cel shaded look ...

[sandman300]

Im Still having problems with UV. took a break from the jolly giant to play with a little green ball of clay. UV maped the face on him. I need better tutorials. :bored:

Any good UV tutorials around?

[Techi]

http://www.newtek.com/products/light...ing/index.html

http://www.newtek.com/products/light..._UV/index.html

http://www.newtek.com/products/light..._uv/index.html

(same as my method, very long winded but works)
http://www.menithings.com/main.php?a..._id=7&manual=1

i only use triangles so it dosnt look as odd, as leroy said smoothing dosnt work well with quads.

[mtmckinley]

Actually, I'd say the opposite... smoothing doesn't work as well with Tris. At least, that's the way Maya and Max are. LW may be different.

[sandman300]

Techi, thanks for the links, Ive only had the chance to do a quick scan of them but I can see that they will be helpful.

In lightwave, from what I've seen , smoothing works with both tris and quads (as long as the quads are plainer). The problem arises when the threshold angle is too high for the surface. Is seems as thow lightwave over smooths a surface which results in defects in the render.

[sandman300]

...huh

[sandman300]

a little more progress. Right here Im a little over 3000 poly.
that leaves me with a goal of 1000 poly or less for eack limb.
doesn't seam too bad. I still haven't optimised him yet.

[mtmckinley]

yeah, lot of optimizing could be done in the crotch area.

Don't concern yourself too much with polycounts (but don't go crazy) until he's done. Then you can start chipping away at him.

Don't forget about the possibilities transparancy maps can give you!