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Poly Count

by Thomas Foster · in General Discussion · 06/14/2006 (1:41 am) · 2 replies

Ive started to get back in torque after about a year away from it.. and i never got anything done then..

So ive started creating some quick 3d graphics, and been thinking that i need to keep the poly down as much as possible, now these arnt textured:

www.wizardschool.co.uk/castle2.jpg

The castle its self is about 1500 polygons (4 sided at the moment)...

The houses are about 50 each.

I can model more complex items, but was trying to keep it all simple and try and get more depth etc when skinning them, but looking at some of the snapshots some items looks to be pretty high in the poly count..

my question: as a guide, my castle, how many poly's could that be? this might be a how longs a piece of string question, but I dont want to spend a few days modelling something to find that torque doesnt like it.
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Torque Owner Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia
#1
06/14/2006 (2:43 am)
Eh... you can't really have proper buildings made in a standard 3d program like that. I mean you _can_ but it's really not advisable, as there's no well defined way to get them to .dif format. Generally you make .dts format objects in normal 3d apps, which are for characters, weapons, set pieces, etc. So if you are actually going to be able to walk around in these objects, you probably shouldn't be making them in a normal 3d program.

The .dif format is used for buildings as it has automatic optomized collision and lightmapping. You make buildings for that with anything that creates .map format objects, like QuArK or GTKRadiant. There's a tool coming out specifically for making buildings in Torque eventually as well, called Constructor.

You can find an extensive explanation of the topic here.

Torque 3D Owner Ted Southard
#2
06/14/2006 (10:32 am)
I agree with Paul, especially with the type of buildings you're making. However, there is a way to do much more complex things that have the detail of DTS and the collision of DIF, which is to build a DTS shape without a collision mesh, and then build a DIF collision object (all collision blocks, which are transparent) to match it. There will be scaling issues to overcome with this method, because DTS and DIF have different scales (or, more to the point, the modellers and map makers do), but if what you are doing is sufficiently complex, such as a cathedral where you want to get all the little pieces of geometry, then it's worth looking at. Otherwise, such as in this case, DIF's are what you want to work with. Hope that helps.