ok while im doing my freelance stuff i want to get a personnel project going.

rahher than a new design, im gonna re-do an old one, that i think had alot of potential but lacked skillfull implementation (hopefully i can do a little better this time)

this is a tank i designed for an FPS style game, the tank rolls on wheel so it can be controlled like normal FPS.

i did this model about 2 years ago when i insisted on using watertight meshes [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img], its therefore a wooping 25K tris gonna hope to halve that and add detail and beef. also my texturing skills were photoshop lazy then, now they are slightly less [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

and heres what i got so far YAY a wheel

800 tris and test mapped

cool design!

neat, if its wheels get damaged, can it ditch them and walk around on the legs?

great lightning, good stuff

update.

one robo BBQd leg mmmm

It looks like you're wating a lot of polys on the low poly sphere wheel deally. Surely you don't need the chamfered tesselations around each of the wheels vertices?

they arnt they are insecting intersecting meshes for the dimples, the wheel is just a geosphere. just the way maxes view port displays it :-)

Why intersecting meshes? Those things could just be painted on the geosphere.

im in two minds about the wheel, i wanted something a bit more interesting than a sphere (silohette wise) but at the mo it is costing too many tris for what it does. they are actually inlayed into the mesh (check otu mapped version) but i think your right theyre not doing enough.

i have two plans
1- do the dimples with a seperate geosphere underneath (160 tris instead of 800, but double the texture space)
2 invert the dimples into tread/lumps like in the original design (more offroad :-) which will keep the same amount of tris but give a more interesting sillohete

Right now you could collapse the wheel "detail" and you would be hard pressed to notice any difference, its just not worth it.

the great thing is that the way its mapped all i have to do is delete the mesh, as the inserts are using only a tiny amount of space.

will do

Why does it have hydraulic pistons? in those locations? I can't really see how they would work. Now if the piston went from the upper leg to the lower one then it would pull the lower half closer causing it to "flex" properly. However if it's got that oversized flex wheel for the joint it should have all the systems necessary to power the bend within it, or within a motor housed in the upper leg. In short, the hydraulic is unnecessary.

Now on the other hand if the housing around the lower wheel foot could extend, stomp into the ground, then retract while the wheel revs to give extra grip and forward momentum, that would not only explain the hydraulics in the lower limb, it would also be pretty cool.

I do like the little port on the upper half of the knee (weak point though, shouldn't be as exposed as it is) and can see steam hissing out of them during and after extremely rapid or stressful movements (could be used to give character to an otherwise lifeless mechanical system).

he he it has two sets of hydraulics cos its rock hard, they both pull the same way, but hydraulics are quite slow so having two sets pulling against each other would double the speed of movement.

i put them there as a nice weak spot that could be exploited by a brave foot soldier brave enough to dodge the legs and plant some explosives.

i was thinking of a foot design but coulnt think of a good enough reason, i like the idea of perhaps a clamp design, like cranes have, but for shootin the heavy artillery.

cheers for the ideas steakhouse :-)

You're welcome man.

Looks awesome so far. It would be neat if you got it in ut2k4 as a vehicle! [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

And question. Is is the high poly rolling sphere those circlar parts are going into the sphere, while in the lowpoly mesh, you have it coming out of the sphere?

I'd also like to know how you did that highpoly one, looks realy good, though from those angles it looks like certian parts are being sqaushed or skewed.

three types of wheel three possibilities

mmmmm vote time

HMMMMMM, such an easy choice. Ofcourse you want to go with the [b]80 tri count.[b]

I like the first and 3rd. But polycount wise, it depends on if its jsut art or going into a game, and what game, how many will be on screen etc.. :P

im thinking 732 actually, as it will be about man height (bit bigger) i think it would be cool to have the extra detail.

i can see how much the body uses

Obviously 80. Come on, quit screwin' around.

haha im going for this slightly modified 800 tris version.

it will be huge in game, wheel will be as tall as man, so i think it deserves the extra detail to the silohette.

plus youd never get that many on screen, and there'd be loads of LODs.

its just for art.



maps just temp/plaything

made good headway on the head





thinking of using 1x 1024x2048 texture space for the leg , and 1x 2048* for the body. thats alot of texture space, but i think it would not be unusable in BF2, (a tank is 1o24x2048, and this is the size of a two story building)

about 10k tris at present, aiming for below 20, i know they are very high but i think its effecient and would be workable.

poop with GI

poop with wires

man this is getting big eeeek