I’ll jump right in: I’m making an industrial-style staircase, which will then follow with a wide catwalk made in the same style. As it is, the staircase has a much higher amount of, well, everything than I want, and that, of course, will only compound exponentially once I create the catwalk/bridge. So I’m hoping ye-of-greater-knowledge can help me
I started with a plane which I simply extruded down the Z, the used the “I” shortcut and drew the inner face in a little, deleted it and the bottom to hollow it out, then used the Array modifier to duplicate it to the specs I wanted. The results weren’t too shabby, for a noob:
(note the single faces on top - and, unseen here, the bottom. Those were split in half, and I went through manually and merged them into singles)
Nonetheless, it’s going to be rather bloated by the time I’m finished, and since it’s going to be part of a game - and not just an image - I can’t have it being ridiculously huge. Not to mention my aging cpu does NOT like when I try to even give it a simple uv mapping.
Anyone have any solution/advice!?
(note the single faces on top - and, unseen here, the bottom. Those were split in half, and I went through manually and merged them into singles)
This will not really reduce the poly count when used in a game engine. Generally the graphics engine will only render triangles so will triangulate those faces. You are replacing 2 quads (4 triangles) with 1 six sided face (4 triangles)
Well! That’s nice to know lol, and frustrating, considering it took me about an hour to go through and do that XD
So what can I do? I’ve tried the Decimate modifier, and it just gets wonky.
It’s not that it has to have that level of detail, I was just hoping I could simulate that style of structuring. Well, trying not to ask a lot here, but do you have a line on any decent - up-to-Blender-date! - tuts? All the ones I’m reading on normal maps are for versions of Blender way back…
You can save this and make a lowpoly version of it and use the game engine LOD system to show the high poly version when you’re closer to it and the low poly version when you’re far away. Anyway 76k tris is a bit much for a staircase I guess but you can render a few million in a game engine so maybe you don’t have to do anything.
Yeah I’ve been thinking about how I can make n bake lol. The only difficulty there is the angles are kind of weird. Ugh I’ve been messing with Blender almost everyday for a couple months now, and it’s irritating to realize how ridiculously noob I still am XD
When the polycount is an issue, you may want to use a texture to fake the whole thing .
By example with a simple png that has transparency :
If i apply that on simple planes
Add a material, enable the material transparency and set its alpha to 0
Make sure for that material texture i enable the alpha too :
And adjust the Mapping size to my needs
I can fake the geometry then , and so have a full stair with a very small total polycount
(i’m using Blender Render, if you’re using Cycles, find the corresponding node settings of course)
Of course with a better texture, the illusion will be even better.
Wow Sanctuary, thank you! That was exactly the kind of answer I was looking for XD
How crafty! I wouldn’t have thought of it that way at all, and it’s elegant in simplicity vs. functionality. Yay, that just made my morning.
