IT'S ALIVE!!! As some of you who have been following this mod for a good long time know, I am prone to lapses of silence. Doesn't mean the mod is a goner, just means I am really busy with personal life, or have been for the past few months. Now that things are settling down finally, work shall resume. However, I do plan on less talking more doing mode of approach, so I will only update this thread with the most relevant announcements.
I started with 3DS Max I don't know when, but once I tried XSI I never looked back. Just doesn't compare. The interface is slick compared to Max's clunky 90's style UI, everything is a keypress away, well laid out, informative. The modelling controls are easy and straightforward, the tools are useful and each new release brings awesome stuff. I mean, just ICE (Interactive Creative Environment) makes it worthwhile. Not to mention features like Unfold for UV's saving
If the reduce polygon tool in Softimage leaves gaping holes in your mesh, that's probably because you have unconnected edges/duplicate vertices. That said, the tool is actually pretty good - my only complaint is that it doesn't leave smooth edgeloops, but since SoaSE ships aren't animated, that's not much of a problem. If you need more flexibility as to which areas of the model will get reduced and which will not, use a weightmap, just remember to attach it to
The base hull texture actually is inspired by YV - when I was first fleshing out the concept for the Xin remake, I wanted to make them look definitely organic, but believably so. The depiction of the Yuuzhan Vong ships as living creatures covered in thick coral-like carapace came to mind, I cooked up a nice looking texture and there you have it. :)
Design around that. Sins engine is quite robust when it comes to the amount of stuff on and off screen, so as I said - if you have complex high-poly meshes, design your faction with fewer deployable ships (higher fleet supply cost). So basically if your models average 2x vanilla poly count, design your faction so that it can deploy only half the total ships a vanilla faction can and make them 2x more powerful. Problem solved, at least as far as your framerate/polygon count is concerne
I am already studying Rebellion and how it works, and I think the Xin could be incorporated rather nicely in the whole dual faction system - they already have two kinds of Titans and I could easily make two distinct factions within the Xin Hierarchy. The only problem could be memory requirements, but for that I need the official release. Before Rebellion is released I will not begin porting the Xin in earnest since the unit stats and abilities are probably not final. In the meantime,
You can smooth the tangent map by going into the operator stack of your model and looking for TangentOp2 operator. Usually you find it by going Selection->Polygon Mesh->Clusters->Texture Coordinates AUTO (or whatever your UV projection you used for tangents is called)->Tangents->TangentOp2
Yeah, unfortunately, that was a bit of a bad design decision. If the player doesn't see it, it doesn't have to be as detailed. But, no point lamenting that. Using a Large Address Aware patch on the executable can help with memory - in fact I've been using it for a long time. But I'd rather avoid having to ask players to patch their game with third party tools just so they can play my mod. Which is why this talk about Rebellion maxing out the engine on its own is worryi
I had good experience with creating tangent maps for my models (which being organic would really suffer from bad tangents) while also using UV mirroring for extra texture space and better resolution. The way I do it, is I create one half of a model, UV map it, texture it etc. Then I symmetrize the whole thing, create a blank copy of the mesh (extract polygons[keep]) to clean its stack while also keeping the old model for reference. On the new copy I add two basic texture proje
I think modders should focus way more on texture optimization than polygon counts when it comes to memory consumption - for example, due to the organic look of my models they have a consistently high polygon count (between 10 and 20 000 tris), but the mesh file increase is negligible (in text format it comes to about 4Mb per model, 1Mb per model in binary) compared to the amount of memory that can be saved by optimizing textures so that they are of the lowest resulution possible while still m
Been a while, but I finally resumed work on Invasion. Here's the latest model, the Warmaster capital ship. This is meant to be a utility capital, focusing on bolstering the performance of the entire fleet, rather than just outright combat. <a href="http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images
Try running the runonce.bat file in your XSI installation directory, if there is one. Otherwise, it sounds like a corrupt model. How your primary app is installed shouldn't affect the .obj file.
Yeah, if you want to do more serious 3D, it kinda gets hard without some specialized tools. I guess you could spend extra time sculpting details in Sculptris, then spending more time retopoing in XSI Mod tool to get a nice edgeflow, UV map and then finally texturing in Gimp. It's amazing how the whole process has changed in the last few years. I remember the above being standard procedure a few years ago and how tedious some parts were - now you can make the base models in Sculptr
Not bad. Looks evil. ;) But don't use sculptris for texturing. Just use it to quickly shape a base mesh, then jump to ZBrush and touch it up there - Sculptris originally started as a plugin for ZBrush and it's only purpose was to make actual sculpting easier, since it uses dynamic tesselation (polygon subdivision/extrusion), wherein in ZBrush you have to constantly remesh your models to prevent polygon stretching. Anyway, I digress. :)
Yeah, Sculptris is awesome, and it's free (at least for now). I find it much better than sculpting in ZBrush, you work faster and there is much less hassle. And you can always switch directly to ZBrush and back for those special tools which Sculptris lacks, like punching holes in your models or hard surface sculpting. Although if you want to retopo, you need to do it by hand in another tool, like ZBrush, or any 3D package (there are many techniques). Personally I use a great tool
Retopology is a process where you take a high-poly model (in this case, the sculpted model is about 300 000 polygons) and retrace its surface topology so that you end up with a generally same shape but with much lower polygon count (the retopo mesh has about 12 000 polys), which is more suitable for game engines, and pretty much anything else, like render scenes.
Wrapping up the last of the static structures this week. Can't believe I'm pretty much done with graphic assets... Here's a few shots of the Masticator, the Xin analog of the extractor units. This is how the model looks when sculpted, before it is retopologized for the game. <a
So, anyone has any idea how much stuff has changed? For example, have they changed the graphic engine but left the underlying mechanics the same (the way textures work etc.)?
[quote who="Swiss Knight" reply="77" id="3106634"]I've also got nothing against anyone who puts together guides in importing models, adding new races, etc. But those can't be the only thing you rely on when making a mod. You can have a mod with 11 races with all new models and crap, but if it plays identically to Sins, whats the point?[/quote] Have to add my .02$ - one could ask the same about mods which can't actually be played in single player mode. But then of course, t
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