Dan Lyke wrote: > On another front: I spent a little time today with the Bell/Textron > drawings and Blender, and I'm starting to see a 206 take shape on my > screen. Despite my years in graphics (several renderers, both > real-time and not, and experience with writing animation systems), > I've never done modeling before, and I may be being too conservative > on polygons. > > And I was so happy to get a basic fuselage together that I was getting > really optimistic, now I'm down to the nitty gritty of two-sided > doors. And aaargh I wish Blender would just let me say "match the > normal for the vertex on this object to the one for the vertex on that > one"... > > You do texture by poly color, and so far I'm just doing a white > fuselage. Should I bother to put UV coordinates on things, or is > trying to texture these aircraft just too heavyweight for now? If I > get a little better at modeling, maybe I'll try to include one of the > stock paint schemes in the model, at the expense of polys. > > Can I just make the doors double-sided for now, or should I model both > an interior and exteror? I guess the downside is that the interior of > the doors ends up the same color as the exterior, right? > > Is it reasonable to end up with two blades by just willy nilly > deleting from your blade model, or is there a hidden gotcha intere? > > Aaaand, talk to me about shadows... > > Thanks! > > Dan > > > > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-users mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users > 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d >
I would recommend only using the materials for how reflective or emmisive a surface is. Doing colors and transparency with full texturing is not a big deal, especially if you are thinking about it when you make the meshes. In Blender this means putting in seams where appropriate and having a plan for how you what to cram the UV maps into the texture images. I like to do the UV maps as I go, and worry about making the textures later. As far as poly budgets go, I aim for having no more than 10,000 visible at a time. With LOD and clipping this gives you quite a bit to play with. In the cockpit view, most of the model will be clipped, and externally most of the heavy stuff in the cockpit can be LOD'd out. The B-29 has well over 10,000 polys, but no more than about 8000 (?) ever get rendered. In fact, the interior is much heavier than the exterior, even with all the compound curves on the four nacelles and those 16 prop blades (multiplying polys by 16 eats up the budget real fast). The gear was problematic too, but you won't have that issue. Also, I would not cut the doors or windows out until you are entirely happy with the shape of the fuselage. The same goes for creating the interior, as it is easiest to just extrude it from the outer skin. I learned that the hard way on the 29 and it probably cost me hundreds of hours. I also recommend getting *lots* of reference photos before you lay out the first poly. Some stuff is real easy to fix later, some is nearly impossible. Also, making stuff double sided in Blender currently has no effect when exporting to AC3D. You have to duplicate the surface and flip normals. Another good idea is to do the animations as you build the model. You should take advantage of the group function of AC3D, but it leads to some pretty complicated situations when you load it into the plib scene graph in FG, so it's best to stay on top of it from the start. There's a hidden learning curve there. Josh _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
