ship of the stars

[VALKYRIE013]

whoh crap.. its amazing what some can do.. sheesh.

love to see this on a ship.. if maya can handle the poly count >_<

[bojangles]

After the initial laying out and detailing these little puppies were hitting 170k (Dun dun DUUUUURRRRRR) but after trimming and cleaning up I got it to 130k. Which is still loads, i know. I'm sure i could get it down more but even over the weekend i couldnt help but add more detail. Like riveting the whole damn thing. I will have to stop at some point because there were supposed to be 10 sets of these placed strategically around the main ships body. And Drop the poly cound somehow. Im back at work at the moment so progress is not as fast as i hoped but i will post some updates when i get a mo to run some renders off.

I dont think it will be Maya, more my computer that will break if I carry on like this

fanks again guys and gurls

[VALKYRIE013]

i use maya myself.. and when the poly count starts to go ver 300,000 (granted the computer isn't exactly the latest greatest) it starts crashin.. especially if you try to convert paint effects to polys THEN render.. MAX is alot more forgiving in the poly count relm..

but don't let that stop you.. always can render in layers

[bojangles]

The only problem i've run into at the moment is with broken geometry. Usually bits and pieices ive been modelling then mirrored/merge verts over and over again leading to N-gons and other nasties. Running the cleanup command and fixing the bad faces seems to do the trick.

i've not really experienced any crashes, but then ive not really used paint-effects that much. The only issue i have is ram at the mo. I've only got 768mgs total, with about around 550 free after xp has taken its chunk and closing anything misc.

the model in total is probably hitting 1.7m at the mo. But thats a provisional figure, subject to change, of course, on about 40ish layers. A full render of that hits the hour mark on my poor puter.

tbh 300k doesnt seem that much for problems to start. It might be worth looking into it further if you're having issues from there. Maya doesnt like n-gons and apparently mental ray doesnt like triangles (????) according to a few sources i read whilst trying to fix my rendering problem the past few months. I know N-gons do cause probs with the mayatomr translator. Sometimes i also get warnings about missing uv sets. If you export a selection without any textures and as an MA file instead of MB you can import it into another scene and it should rectify a few obvious things.

And I wont be going anywhere near MAX. Me no likey. Maya has been a friend and confident for 3+ years now and there will be no unfaithfullness :P

[VALKYRIE013]

true here too.. beenon maya for 2 years now.. done a crash course in max.. like maya more..
thanks for the ngons.. forgot about those.. though cleanup usually like to convert to triangles.. so i have to watch it..

keep up the good work.. really inspireing me.. my detail work is lacking in you are showing its posible... thanks

[bojangles]

here's what i do when i "cleanup"

Isolate the piece you will clean and hide everything else. Select the piece and select clean-up from the mesh menu. In the cleanup options turn on: select matching polygons, Apply to selected objects, faces with more than 4 sides, lamina faces and non-manifold geometry. everything else should be switched off. When cleanup is run the object will do one of 2 things. If it is clean then the object appears unselected. If there are dodgy things then it will change to faces and highlight the dodgyness, either n-gons or verts.

From here i would use the "split faces tool" to manually recut the geometry so its clean and with as little triangles as possible. You might also see groups of verts together which wont go even after cutting and the easiest way there is to delete the face and "append to polygon" to fill in the hole with a new face. Keep fixing bits until the object unselects when cleanup is run and your done. A handy thing ive done is to add the cleanup to my shelf (hold down ctrl-shift then select cleanup from the menu and it will appear on your shelf as a button) then you dont have to go fishing for it all the time. With symetrical geo you can obviously cleanup just a quater/half/whatever and mirror it back, saving time and effort. I wouldnt let cleanup do the work as i like the control.

hope that helps

[bojangles]

I've had a little time to start importing the rest of the ship into the new file so heres a few nice, big, test renders. I've placed the cannons from before in their slots. Just shows how much i have left to do.

Anyway, c and c appreciated

Bo

[liam887]

awesome one of the best WIP here!

[Hundred]

I hope you got a biiiiiiiiiiiig paint brush Mr. bojangles, because I can see that it's going to be a nightmare painting this thing. But it's looking pretty awesome, keep it going, great stuff, .

[Ozylot]

Looks awesome!!

Got some pretty bright lights on the thing though.