I've been working on this car for a couple of days. It's for my Unreal mod. I'm planning on using it as a dynamic object that can react to explosions, collisions and stuff like that.

At the moment it has abaut 3000 tris. I'd like to know if that's already too much or can I put more detail in it. There's propably going to be something like 10 cars at the same time in my mod.

Sounds like a cool prop.

I haven't used unreal so I'm not sure what poly counts, ect... you should be aiming for. However I do alot of game models for Doom3 right now, it can handle tons of polys but still fewer is better.
With that said i think you should probably optiiize and get it down closer to 1000. the roof (inside especially) and outside could come down, the trunk and hood could be alot lower. Keep the siluette close and get rid of wasted polys that don't contribute to the shape much.
use those polys for details like grill and headlights.

use simple two sided polys to add windows, would be cool to see them cracked, or cracked when hit...

You could add a simple steering wheel and use an alpha plane for the 'spokes', ect...

Thanks! Now that you mentioned I realized that it has a butt load of useless polys. I need to get rid of them.

I'd recommend arranging the polies on your wheels like that.


//edit: and use less than you have now.

Hehe Moskvitch/IZ?

it's worth mentioning that is not an absolute rule-if you want to texture a quarter of the circle and rotate the texture you'll need that vert. Depends on if you need to worry about polys or texture space more

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I'd recommend arranging the polies on your wheels like that.




//edit: and use less than you have now.

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While I somewhat agree with that idea, you can save UV space with the first on, and give the wheel some form of curved shape with the center point.

I agree that the one wiht the center vertex will work better for low poly models and for UV space, however programs like Zbrush will make a mess out of them and the one on the right will work out better. I usually build both for something that needs a normal map.

Not sure if this helps in unreal, but I've seen this in low poly situations. cap the wheel's cylinder with one tri and texture it with the hubcap/tire diffuse map and then alpha out the remainder.

with my experiance in Unreal using an opacity texture is almost more taxing then just adding more polys, so I'd go with the polys first.

That's correct. Saving 100 triangles doesn't mean anything once you throw an alpha map in there. You will generally always run out of texture memory long before your platform chugs due to poly counts.

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At the moment it has abaut 3000 tris. I'd like to know if that's already too much or can I put more detail in it. There's propably going to be something like 10 cars at the same time in my mod.

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I read somewhere that Unreal 3 has a base guide of 15000-16000 tris per character up close, and 5000-6000 in LOD that will be seen from far away.

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Hehe Moskvitch/IZ?

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Yeah it's a Moskvitch [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Hahahaha, I knew it, but someone else beat me to it lol.

Ok I managed to optimize it quite a bit

YOu still have way too many edges on your brakes. Should half the amount at least. If your going to leave that open ( ie. no wheel on it ) then you should add some suspension detail.

Kill those edges on the front bumper. Its completely flat. Can't really tell whats going on on the rear window seal. Looks like a lot of wasted tris.

Yeah transparency can make some games chug. I haven't seen that with Doom3 yet though, it seems to handle that very well and I have used a similar trick to the wheel idea to my benefit making gears that are alot lower poly.
Doom3 can handle tons of polys to, but the real issues arise when multiple light sources hit a tri.

I think you can still kill a ton of polys and not even notice once a good texture is in place.
I think it would be more interesting to put polys into having a door ajar and all the major components in place.
Steering wheel, rear view mirror, lug bolts on the hubs, ect.. instead of just a really smooth curve to the body panels.

Heheh!! Added loads of stuff but still managed to reduce tris. What do you think about the axels?
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This is now ready for textures. I hope 3000 tris isn't too much. Come on! It's Unreal3! 3000 tris is nothing.