Hi all, I am, after many years of semi-pro 3d work looking to get involved in some game model design. My experience dates as far back a long way to sculpt-animate on the amiga in the late 80s up to current 3d software! I specialise in inorganics such as machinery, vehicles etc though I do a bit of everything. I am also very experienced with bitmaps (photoshop) for textures etc. That sounds like a resume but its just background! There are a few specific questions Im hoping people can answer. 1: I''m new to ''low-poly'' work. How many polys is low. for say a tank in a game, or a building. 2: textures. what formats/modes/resolutions are universal? 3: Model file formats.. any particularly good general formats to produce so that demo models will be accesible to people? 4: Are there any particular limitations of modern game engines that I should be aware of? 5: Say I produce some good (in my opinion) samples.. whats a good place/forum to show them to a few people who know their gaming models? Any help very much appreciated! Shaun

Hey there...

quote: 1: I''m new to ''low-poly'' work. How many polys is low. for say a tank in a game, or a building.

depends on the engine. Unreal uses something like 1200 polys for a player model.

quote: 2: textures. what formats/modes/resolutions are universal?

Textures are always square. 128x128 or 256x256 are the most common. Some games use 512x512 but that''s somewhat rare. I think Quake3 uses 128x128 for the heads and 256x256 for bodies on player models. Unreal Tournament on the otherhand uses 512x512 for the whole model.. I *think*.... and formats depend on the engine...

quote: 3: Model file formats.. any particularly good general formats to produce so that demo models will be accesible to people?

lots of people use the Quake2 MD2 format, or the halflife format. MD2 is very common but most engines have thier own model formats... just use OBJ files and everyone should be able to look at them....

quote: 4: Are there any particular limitations of modern game engines that I should be aware of?

Most engines don''t do decent bump/diffuse mapping, they can''t do realtime reflections or shadows. Also you should be aware of the different LOD options in various engines. Quake 3 has LOD but basically you just model 3 models at different levels of complexity and the engine uses a different model depending on the range..

quote: 5: Say I produce some good (in my opinion) samples.. whats a good place/forum to show them to a few people who know their gaming models?

www.polycount.com is hands down the best place to go. In fact, once you check that place out I doubt you''ll want to come back here

disclaimer
All the stuff above is remembered off the top of my head and could be totally wrong. But polycount is a great resource and it will correct any mistakes I''ve made in my post here...

just my $0.02