Hi everyone Im new.

I have been tasked with creating the armoured shuttle buses from "Dawn of the Dead" for a Left4Dead mod. I was wondering if you guys could tell me a rough polycount that I should aim for.

Also I thought I'd ask this. Does anyone know what the buses are. I think its a Ford E-350 shuttle bus but the website I got the information from seemed a bit hit and miss.

And the best place to find the blueprints. I've tried the-blueprints website does anyone know any other good car blueprint sites.

Cheers
steve

I'm also interested in a good blueprint site.

But as far as polycount goes, that's really up to the level designer and just the type of environment its going to be, and whatnot. But I would say probably something like 4-5K at the most? It depends if they are going to place more than one around, if so, then probably less than that.

Posting some pictures would help I guess.

About the polycount, I think some levels have some sort of buses already, I would go and see how many sides their wheels have, how curved the bodies are, which details are modeled and which ones are painted on/normal mapped etc. Then try to match those polygon densities. You should also be able to check the models in Valve's model viewer(included in Source SDK)

Just in case you missed this site:

http://www.the-blueprints.com/

Good luck!

You should be able to use the model viewer within the SDK to load up things like car/bus models out of L4D. By doing that you can see their wireframes and from there you can make an approximation. If it's a big hero prop I'd say you could probably use in excess of 8-10k tris and not run in to any real issues.

Hi, thanks I already checked that website. I think the bus is a Ford E-350 I looked up IMCDb and that is a database of vehicles in films. Does anyone know if it is possible to extract models from L4D with the beta SDK and take them into another package like Maya.

http://www.suurland.com/