Looks good. Welcome back.

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Yes, it's 3dsmax 7.

The BF2 engine doesn't handle 60,000 Poly models very well so that was one thing I struggled with in BF2. After a while I got used to being limited to 3000-8000 faces for my models, and learned to squeeze as much detail as I could out of those polys.

Since my first post I've cut the gear bay's and I'm working on the doors. The rear landing gear on this plane is very awkward, not so much the gear itself but the 3 piece gear doors. Once I've worked my way down to the wheels I will update this thread with some new renders.

Looks lovely! You could be onto a real winner.

Double post but I wanted to post an update on the Hun.

I've finished cutting the gear bay's and gear doors, hopefully I won't have to change them. The gear is 80-90% complete, I want to add a few more details to really make them look like the real thing. They are complex and I'm sure it's going to be a PITA to get them animated properly. I'm not sure how the gear retraction and extension goes since I've never found any videos showing the sequence. I also corrected a few errors with the vertical stab and the windscreen. I've redone the leading edge slats so they will look like the real deal when they extend.

Dornep wrote on Oct 25^th, 2007 at 5:58pm:


I'm not speaking of "polished UVW Maps and textures." I'm talking about spending a few minutes to create some very basic textures and UVW Mesh Maps. Enough to provide something just a bit more interesting than gray putty.

I think he is referring to base textures where you would have the outline of the model's surface with a few lines here and there. Am I right?

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First of all, I offered this as a suggestion, not a criticism.  I just thought I'd share a professional tip, learned the hard way from authoring many, many models over the years.

Yes, that is precisely what I was suggesting. More often than not, a quick UWV Map and some base texture will reveal rogue polys, co-linear or co-located vertices, and abnormal normals when the mesh is exported and rendered in situ (meaning loaded in the sim!).

I've lost count of the number of models that've been sent to me by modelers who've suddenly discovered that their hard work in Max/GMax looks badly when exported and loaded in the sim, or worse...  looks terrific but suffers from horrible frame rates!

Perhaps though, a careful read of Adrian* Wood's four-part series on "Performance Art" will better illustrate the critical nature of carefully crafted textures as applied to mesh objects, and the need for greater synthesis between the two processes, particularly as the necessity of optimizing draw calls has become the single most important metric for performance in the sim.

It is clear to me (as well as many of my professional colleagues) that the days of textures almost being an afterthought are over. I've now found that I need to actually pre-plan my textures as part of the initial development process, since a lot of the mesh modeling decisions will be affected by the texture sheet decisions...

http://blogs.technet.com/torgo3000/archive/2007/06/01/performance-art.aspx

*Note: Adrian Woods is the Lead Art Developer for ACES