Even for Hard Body work a paint program like 3D Coat is useful. Need a spot of rust? A dented fender?

These things are tough to do in MoI, but for 3D Coat it's a piece of cake.

Yes, I can appreciate the painting aspect but when you have a low poly model targeted for a game and you have no other choice but to blow up the poly count upon import it sorta makes the package unusable for ya.

Granted for normal mapping, it's not a problem at all as long as I make sure not to destroy the original low poly version...

-Will

Hi all
A while back I tried importing models into 3d coat and it smoothed them all, which want very helpful as they were intended to have angles. But that's beside the point really.

The main reason for my post is that I'm a bit confused by the polygon issue. As far as I understand things less polygons is better because it uses less memory. Is there any advantage in (for want of a better example) displacement painting a wall? I've only just worked out how to UV map things properly so displacement mapping seems a bit of an advanced area at the moment and I'm wondering how and why I should use it.
Keith

Hi Keith. There is no hard rule for when you should use displacement or when you can get away with just using bump/normal mapping. If your wall is made of large stones, you may want to use geometric displacement or else the stones won't look real at the wall perimeter. But if you sculpted details on the wall (paint blobs, picture frames, cracks, electrical outlets, etc) then you're probably OK to use normal/bump mapping as it will look nearly identical to the displaced surface but will render A LOT faster. The only time it would be a problem is if you rendered the wall from a glancing angle. Those details will then appear to be increasingly flat (as they are in fact painted on the wall). In situation like that, you need to use geometric displacement...

jonah

PS - 3DCoat now has an option to import the model without smoothing it. It was added for people working with CAD models...

Hi Keith,

> As far as I understand things less polygons is better
> because it uses less memory.

That's usually the case if you want to render the object with its current shape.

But if you want to modify the shape to do stuff like add craters and lumps in it, stuff like that then in that case it can be useful to use a much more dense mesh so that there are enough points in the middle of a shape to be pushed around.

In cases like that where you want to edit the kind of inner pieces of an object that is when you might need to make more polygons to make that possible.


Another example is animation - if you want to animate an object to do something like make if flex and bend, it will probably need to be made up of a larger number of points more evenly distributed throughout the object.


There are a lot of different kinds of things you can do with a model, so there isn't only just one single rule to follow in all cases - for different tasks you may need to create polygons in different ways.

Sort of the default way is more oriented towards just rendering the object directly so by default it is usually focused on making the lower polygon count style.

- Michael

As far as the polygon count, It depends on its use and inteded result. Yeah spending $1 to by a car sounds like and sometimes is a good Idea, Sometimes you want to spend $300,000 to get the McLaren F1! Just depends on what you WILL do with it.

[EDIT]
Once again Michael beats my post so I seem redundent....Please refer to the post just previous to this one.
Burr
[edit]

burrman and all
Your points are all well made and informative. Thanks a lot. I'm learning fast.
Keith