Hello everyone, Im new to 3D modeling and Blender alike and have just started out experimenting with it recently. I have a couple of questions:
1: This fine horsie here is made to be inserted in a MMORGP, and I have read that with “big” monsters like these its ok if you stick to under 2000 polys. I ended up with under 500, so Im starting to wonder, is there something else I have to take into account when modeling creatures for animation, or is it really this simple? 2000 polys seem rather much to me - I really have no clue where I would put in that many, unless there is something fundamentaly wrong with the model I have done!
2: When I want to unwrap the UV mapping, although the seams go neatly through to cut the horse in two exactly equal halves, and I have the legs, head, tail etc etc also cut out, the maps I get are totally distorted and unequally big. For instance, half of the horses body was about as big as the Image Editor square, while the other half was small enough I could only see jumble of tiny dots, which was all the vertices… is it really supposed to be this way? Do I have to move all the vertices one by one in the Image Editor until the two halves are the same size? Or do I have some setting on that I shouldnt?
If you need more Details then you end up with more verts.
Your mesh look good so far, and if you gone make the eyes and other details with Textures then there is nothing wrong with it.
Hey DragonSnail,
Nice model. It has some great heft and mass to it, which is hard to do – organic lowpoly models can easily seem rather floaty and have no relationship to the ground and gravity. Here are some answers to your questions – more personal thoughts than any kind of “right-way-of-doing-things” answer.
You might want to see if you are counting faces or triangles. Most game artists refer to polycount as the number of tris. You can find the actual tri count by selecting the decimator and seeing what it says. You are pretty clean in using quads in all but a few places, so your tri count will be almost double your face count. When I do organic creatures for games (especially for an online game), I usually shoot for between 800-1200 tris. 2000+ might be needed for characters, most of the extra detail being in the face and hands. The only place you might consider is adding detail to joints, but you probably won’t notice that until you try to rig it and animate it. They look like they might work OK, but the front knee joints look like they might have edge loops that are too unnaturally evenly perpendicular to the leg (just a thought).
There are some tools that help make cleaner starting points for UVs, but in my personal experience, I always need to smush verts around to get the result I want. One shortcut you may consider if you are using mirror modeling (which it sounds like you are) is to unwrap one half of the model before duplicating and stitching it up. That way you will have two identical uv islands laid on top of each other to work with. You can keep them that way if you have a symmetrical texture, or you can grab and drag one set off and flip it around to have two equal halves. Sorry if I didn’t explain myself well enough – i have to run off to a coworker’s birthday lunch. Also, if you are getting some areas too big and some too small, check over your your seems up close. Sometimes there is a double that needs to be removed or an interior face you didn’t see when you stitched it up.
Oh, LKEY selects and island, BKEY for box select. SKEY and RKEY WKEY can be used for scaling, rotating, and welding/aliging just like in the 3D window. So, no you don’t need to do editing one vert at a time.
Thanks a lot for the answers guys! Backbone, I have already watched the tut you linked several times, to try and fix this problem, but it doesnt really give me the answer I need. It worked fine on a face I textured, but on the horse the unwrapping is simply too… uneven.
Scotths, many thanks for the advice - since this is the first time I do something similar, any information I can get my hands on is valuable! What I counted was the vertices - when looking into the decimator tool I find that the tris are close to 1000, just like you suspected. I can see now that I have to be especially vary around the joint areas, as the previous humanoid model I made only has a single edge around the kneecaps, which would result in a V-shaped knee if I bend it in animation… :-? Perhaps the best thing to do at this point is to try animation and see how it affects the models, thus learning more about how I need to make them.
I have tried mirror modeling before, but decided against it this time, since Im still such a newbie in Blender and I wanted to get a better “feel” for the shape. Perhaps mirror modeling would have been better for me in the unwrapping phase though. I have been very careful in selecting the same vertices on each side for the seems, but Im bound to have missed something, somewhere, if that is the reason the mapping unwraps unevenly. The seems are running on the same places on both sides, it cant be that, and I removed all doubles and interior faces. Whaaa, modeling was FUN up to this point!
CD38, that tutorial is awsome - I would never have thought unwrapping could be done like that, so thanks a bunch for linking it! That will make seems look seemsless, if I understand the tut properly.
