Hey folks, I haven’t really been around much in the WIP board recently, but trust me, it’s not because I haven’t been doing anything. I’ve decided to start a Stargate themed mod for Battle for Middle-Earth II, and I think I’ll use this thread to show my modeling and texturing work. Several people on the BFME modding forums have expressed interest in the project and I already have a part time mapper/coder to help out. I’m still hoping for a good organic modeler though.
A Goa’uld fortress in-game screen cap. The fortress door still doesn’t actually work, but I’m working on it. Model and texture are purely my work. (Pomperi from texturehub.net did spruce up the pyramid brick texture a bit.)
Here’s the staff weapon model as low poly as I could bear to let myself make it.
And with my first failed texture attempt. Yikes!:eek: I’ll keep at it…
A so far headless Jaffa. I would like to make it clear that the entire body is EA’s game model, NOT mine. The weapon, hands, legs and feet, collar, and shoulder guards are mine.
And an obelisk statue. The model was already in the game, I simply remapped the model and gave it a new texture.
I did the carvings with GIMP’s bump map filter and some black and white pics I found on Google. I figure ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are public domain material by now.
Most organic models are going to be humanoid, but there are some things like animal shaped Jaffa helmets and other curvy mechanical things to deal with. I’d have to see some of your work first, meaning RTS friendly lo-poly characters that you’ve made from scratch. I wasn’t really looking for recruitment here, but I’m glad you offered.
Right now I’m working on making a low poly version of my gate (there will be one per map, and most reinforcements will come from it to give it strategic importance.) Here’s more info on the mod if you’re interested. link (Beta I will only have Tau’ri and Goa’uld factions.)
The gate is a very special object to the game and there will only be one per map, so I’m willing to go a bit higher with the poly count than I normally would. So far it’s 10,272 tris.
The most complex fortress in the regular game is around 6,000 tris for comparison.
10,000 is pushing it for a game like this, if you let your self slip and add more triangles to things you like, you can get sloppy and bog the game down with too many on other objects if you get into the mentality of “a few more wont hurt”. Personally i’d worry less about the modelling fo the fine textures and more about making hte thing look round.
I understand what you’re saying, but believe me, this will be the only object getting such a lavish poly budget. Others have noticed too that with Sage engine object count actually matters a lot more than poly count (link), and I’ve just noticed a way I can cut a bunch of tris I already have on the model.
aybe to reduce the tris on the stargate thing, texture the sybol things onto it byt taking render of the front veiw and using that to UV the symbols on.
Its insane how the gate still looks awesome even with such a low poly count! lol maybe not I could be able to render it in indigo O-o the full version makes me run out of ram
Well, modeling has come to a halt for a bit because I had to completely rethink the scale of the game. Svenniemannie was kind enough to make a low poly version of his F-302 for my mod, and here is what it looked like when I tested it in the game as just a still model.
The thing is almost as big as the fortress!:eek: (Correctly proportioned to the units.)
So I tried scaling the units down by .5 and scaling the fortress up by 1.5 to get something like this:
The archers are normal game scale for comparison, and I obviously haven’t redone the fortress door yet. When I do, it will look something like this:
The grey boxes indicate expansion build plot locations.
Hmm scaling is a lot better now, I’m gonna have to look up that episode where they use and F-302 to send the gate into space to see if what the F-302 <-> Stargate ratio is but from what I remember its pretty darn close to that. I cant wait to play it
Nice models. I like the gate, and i have to agree that its a bit to high poly. But if it works then it works and thats all that matters.
And now that you’ve retouched the scaling it looks a lot better, the pyramid before looked way to small.
I’m working on my own stargate game atm to so this will be interesting to watch. How many polys is your staff weapon? The texture on it is very good. My only worry with the staff weapon is that it looks pretty high poly. If its going to be carried by a bunch of soldiers (like in that other picture with the spear soldiers) then that could be to much.
I love 'em I’d help but I doubt my modeling skills are up to the task. 
