[Static] New House [WIP]

[Elirah]

Firstly to say, I'm not that good at modeling, especially when it comes to model for games. However, I made a model which I made within Blender 3D (I know I need 3Ds Max for anything further, though exporting from Blender should not be that problem). So for the beginning, I just want to get some overall feedback, back in mind I know I need to get all the faces into tries.
Further on, I'm also a pretty noob at UV-Unwrapping, where I may need help or advise. However, getting up the LOD's and the col-meshes should not be the problem for me, due I already know, how I'm going to make them.

So here are some Pictures:





***Update:


Greetings, Elirah.

[lucky.BOY]

Do you have any references, or are you making it out of your head?

And no, you dont need to convert everything to tris, the exporter does that for you when you export the model. Actually I find it much better to work with quads when you can. However, the tris count (in 3ds max its counting all tris, wheter they are in tris, quads or polys) is good for understanding how well opimized the model is.

Right now there are many unnecessary tris in your model, you have to weld everything together and also delete those faces that wont be ever visible to player.

Here is for example, how the front wall should look:



For exporting model to BF2, you need 3d Studio Max 9 (not 2009, but 9). versions 8 or 7 would probably do, too.

Here is a tutorial on how to UV statics for Bf2:

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-m ... ettes.html

On the layout side of things, do you have a different model for the bottom floor? with entrance and such?

[Elirah]

Well, today I as well overviewed my model...
I recognized its unoptimized anyways (it is fairly old). However, I'm using a mirrormodifier which made those extra vertices in the middle.
I got a reference, but actually I can't find it anymore, it was just the floor plan.
Well and yes, I made the actual floor, the ground floor with the entrance and the rooftop.

I also want some sideinfo. How effective is the exporter in making those tris? If there are tris, would he notice? But yes, for modeling I wont use tris, they mess up edgeloops and reeditability.

Thanks for reply, I'm going to try to redo it.

[lucky.BOY]

Well, i dont know how exactly the exporter works, but i guess it goes through polys, it lets tris be, and then splits each quad into two tris, each 5-gon into 3 tris, etc. No need to worry about that though.

One other thing, be sure not to start doing LODs and COLs until you are perfectly done with UVs and possibly get them approved here, too. It will save you big time of redoing things over and over.

[Elirah]

Now, as i began to model, I saw how good your advice was. Never thought about it, but with that method I saved so many faces and vertices, I was suprised. ops:

However, now the new model of the midfloor:


Greetings Elirah

[lucky.BOY]

Now when you make statics in Bf2, you are basically modelling them to textures, because when texturing a house like this, you will basically UV it onto existing texture pallettes. That way, multiple buildings will use same texture pallettes, and that will save RAM space while reducing number of loaded pallettes.

Best way to get some basic understanding of this is to do that tutorial i linked few posts above.

Now on your model, there is still plenty of unneccessary edges, but you might want to leave some of them in place or even add some more, depending on texures you will be using.

So what I advise you is to setup a pr_edit mod, as described here, and go through all texture pallettes and see what you might use later on.
Important thing is to try and use all palletes, that is color, detail, dirt and crack, if you want to use them all, with similar "location" if you know what i mean. If you want this to be middle eastern builing, try sticking to ME pallettes, or russian ones if you want this to be from Russain maps.

Great tool for viewing .dds images is WTV. Another good tool is Bfmeshview, you can view all objects in it, and you can see what texture pallettes they use.
You might want to use some edges to alternate between two detail or color textures, or you might want to use them so some dirt texture is only on part of a wall, not on all of it. Same with crack textures.

When you get some idea in your head, optimize the model a little more, maybe get rid of verticles marked here and similar ones on other side:



Are you going to export it as one object, or three separate ones?

Also, i believe you are violating forum rules by size of your images, might be better to resize them to 1366x768-ish resolution from now on, or not to use IMG tags for large ones.

I realized im not praising you at all, the model looks really good, you are doing great job, i hope you will get this ingame and then hopefully make more and more high quality statics.

Cheers

[rodrigoma]

more and more high quality statics.
Cheers

Yes ,yes, more statics! MORE!
just kidding great job doing this!

[Psyko]

If i may ask a question from the other people giving advice...

I have it on good authority that the main reason you get FPS drops in game are because of various texturing problems...

But what kind of quality can the geometry be? How complicated and how many tris or quads or whatever (i thought you only used quads so looping was easier for complicated shapes on weapons mostly)

I know the weapon meshs are at their best at something like 5000 to 7000 correct? Well do buildings obey this or do they need to be even more optomized?

Also Elirah, my friend uses blender for everything having used maya and max he settled for Blender saying it was easier to use, he also mentioned that there is a "decimate" function much like the "optimize" function in flash. (it reduces the amount of detail of your model) Hope that is of some help.

[Rhino]

I have it on good authority that the main reason you get FPS drops in game are because of various texturing problems...

While some do suffer from texturing issues, many buildings also suffer from mesh issues and worst of all draw call issues.

But what kind of quality can the geometry be? How complicated and how many tris or quads or whatever (i thought you only used quads so looping was easier for complicated shapes on weapons mostly)

I know the weapon meshs are at their best at something like 5000 to 7000 correct? Well do buildings obey this or do they need to be even more optomized?

Any model, no matter if its a building, weapon or vehicle should be as optimized as it should be and not have any unnecessary tris, verts etc. While these issues are not so much of a problem on the smaller, lower poly objects because there is simply not that many extra tris and its still below the average tri count, the bigger problem comes when that modeller then moves onto bigger objects where then thous small faults are times many times over and then players are trying to render an object that has as many, many, many more tris than it should...

The above building I would say is something far too big to start off static modelling on. You should start off on something small and simple tbh so its easy to learn where you need to optimize, then carry on what you've learnt onto something a bit bigger each time.

The unoptimized problem becomes much more serious on the cols thou where a complicated col mesh is much harder for the server to process and can slow down the entire server for all the players quite significantly.

But tbh at the end of the day, you can have very detailed models ingame working well, the point is, is that they are made correctly and are optimized with good lods and col meshes, then only high gfx users see them in full detail when close up to the object and as such, can handle that providing everything else around them is also optimized.

EDIT: btw really good feedback lucky

[Elirah]

Hey guys, thanks for the tips and so on.
I'm actually going to optimise it again. Repost a picture, and save my current model just for the case where an edit is needed.
I'll also post the tricount then.

Greetings Elirah

[lucky.BOY]

Please post update also in the thread, not only in the first post. It may be good to post it also in 1st post, as someone how would discover this would get an idea how far the model without reading whole thread, but please post it also in the thread.

Now you need to rework the floor. As I see it now, you have one quad going across multiple rooms, under walls. This can leed to lightbleed, as seen for example here (though this one is most probably caused by bad lightmap UVs).
What you need to do is to delete the whole floor and then rebuilding by bridging together edges in each room. You should end with floor polygons only in rooms where they will be visible, not under walls. It will make tri count higher, but its the only way to prevent lightbleed like this.

Similar ones are walls, that are also where they shouldnt be visible. This may also lead to lightbleed. Probably best to get rid of them, too.



If you would leave them that way, light could "bleed" through the wall.


Other than that its looking good, i think you should switch to 3ds max rather sooner than later, though.

PS: No need to fill in "reason" every time you edit your post, unless its a reason that should be known. The reasons you type there look kinda funny

[Psyko]

cheers rhino

[Elirah]

Well, until now I didnt know anything about that bleed. How does it occur?
This actually leads into higher Tris. Is the bleed otherwise avoidable?
The marked areas I made, to lower the Tricount...

3Ds Max is pain in the ***. Need a bit to learn how to work with it. Editing the mesh is much more easier in Blender than it is in 3Ds Max.

Something I want to know about too:

If I use the texture palettes, is there a possibility to render Ambient Occlusion on it? The floore is unwrapped on the pallets without using its own uv-image?
Something just came into my mind I learned in one of the tutorials, where this bleeding happens due buffed shadows, which can be reduces by using ambient occlusion where the bleed is darkened again.
However, if you lightmap it in 3Ds Max, is there now possibility to render it with rayshadows onto the shaddowmap?

Greetings Elirah

[Rhino]

Well, until now I didnt know anything about that bleed. How does it occur?
This actually leads into higher Tris. Is the bleed otherwise avoidable?

higher tris are worth it if it for cutting down on unseen face space and fixing other issues like texture bleeding etc.

some info on pixel bleeding: https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f189-m ... eding.html

One way to solve pixel bleeding, is with custom LM UVs, which can dramatically increase the quality and reduce the size of building LMs, but at the same time in order to really make an impact with custom LM UVs you really need a good mesh that's all welded up so you can take advantage of this.

I would personally weld up the floor with your walls, as while yes it adds quite a lot of extra tris, the end result both in terms of the mesh and the lightmaps is soo much better and worth the extra tris than one massive floor area that covers all the rooms.

[Elirah]

Well, thanks Rhino, I know that info of yours, I read nearly all of your tut's and info.

I'll redo the mesh, again. =)

[Elirah]

Soo, before I'll make the floor, I got a question:


Currently I made changes to where the walls are, deleted corners which did'nt add anything important to the mesh, so without the floor I reduced again the Tricount which is currently 714.
However, I painted in red, where i would add the floorgeometry. Now the question: Is this optimized? This is what i currently can think of is the best with the lowest tricount I can think of. But maybe you teach me again something important I can learn of.

Greetings Elirah.
And so far, thanks a lot for you help.

Edit: Another question: Is BF2 able to handle doublesided faces?

[Doc.Pock]

Edit: Another question: Is BF2 able to handle doublesided faces?

no except for undergrowght.

[Rhino]

Ye although just to be clear it should be this, which is probably what you mean by the above just want to make sure we are on the same page

Edit: Another question: Is BF2 able to handle doublesided faces?

Yes but not for staticobjects like these.

If you want a double sided faces you need to clone the faces and flip them

Doc.Pock;1808956']no except for undergrowght.

Undergrowth are one sided, Overgrowth leaves on the hand are two sided, but only in a certain setup.

[Elirah]

Hmm...
You already made tris, which I thought they are made when I'm converting it (as lucky.BOY told me).
Now I'm confused.

[Rhino]

You can work in tris, quads, ngons (although not a very good idea) or a mixture of all the above.

The export script will turn the model fully into tris on export when it goes to BF2, as BF2 has to be in tris, but if the model already has tris then it just keeps the user defined tri, rather than working it out for itself.

Working in quads (where you can) is mostly better for work flow, as its easier to select rings and loops etc, and when dealing with sub-division modelling you pretty much have to work in quads for the smoothing to work correctly.