scott wrote:
>> Out of curiosity, how many days did it take to reach this stage?
> 
> The longest part is finding the background images, getting them scaled 
> correctly (ie how many pixels correspond to how many metres in real 
> life) and placing them correctly in the modelling software.  This takes 
> about 30 minutes.

Yeah, I'll bet! :-/

> The front wing you see, probably took about 20 minutes, most of that 
> time is just moving around vertices until they are lined up nicely in 
> all views.

Damn you're fast! o_O

Last time I tried to do this, it took about an hour and a half to model 
a banana. And that was using a special "mode" where you're basically 
just deforming a sphere.

>> Also, what software are you using here?
> 
> Blender.

OK. It's definitely Wings that I tried out then, cos it didn't look 
anything like this. I'll have to give Blender a go at some point...

>> How many GB is it going to take to store the entire finished car?
> 
> Hardly anything, because the mesh is only stored at the basic level that 
> you have defined, the smoothed mesh is generated on-the-fly.
> 
> Of course exporting the smoothed mesh to POV is a different matter, and 
> of course depends on how much smoothing you want and what format etc.  
> If I export to a file to be used in a game, and assume perhaps 32 bytes 
> per vertex, 100k vertices makes that a 3MB file.

Interesting. HL2 is "only" a computer game, and so presumably has the 
lowest possibly polygon counts, and yet it fills a 4GB DVD.

Even more interesting: Apparently npc_alyx has 8,232 polygons. That's a 
tiny, tiny number for such an absurdly complex object!

(BTW, you have *no idea* how hard it was to find this number!)

Back in the days of Q2, there was a console command that would turn off 
all texture mapping. Made the whole map look like it was covered in snow 
or something. I wonder what HL2 would look like with no texturing?

>> How do you know that the smoothed mesh will actually match your 
>> expectations?
> 
> Well you just look - when you edit the mesh with the smooth turned on, 
> you can see both the basic mesh and the smoothed result.  If the smooth 
> is being too "harsh" around a certain point you want to keep sharp, you 
> simply increase the "crease" amount on certain edges on the basic mesh, 
> this makes the smooth stick closer to the basic mesh around that edge.  
> Naturally all this is done interactively, so just fiddle about with the 
> settings on the basic mesh until the smoothed mesh looks right.

OK. Last time I tried to do this, you hit "smooth" and wait ten minutes 
for it to do all the computations. (As you can probably tell, this was a 
while ago...)

[Actually, the first "smooth" is about 20 seconds. It's the second, 
third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eight smooth operations that 
take the time! Not to mention tweaking the mesh inbetween...]

Post a reply to this message