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Gmax and making models...
Author
Hi there,
thanks to Gmax and the holidays, I decided to give a bit of a try to modelling again (well, it has been a few years since 3DS2.0). so here I am going through the tutorials like a hot knife through butter...
but, I wonder. If I do models the way they describe it, will they be compatible with, say, Halflife, or Tribes 2 (the two engines I am considering for my project).
In particular, I am worried about the polycount, and the fact that Gmax doesnt even seem worried about faces not being triangles... is there a function to convert everything to triangles or is the software converting to triangles implicitly ?
Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !
Now, I''m not entirely certain about Gmax, because I haven''t used it, but pretty much every program I''ve heard of has something like a "Triple" function (Lightwave term, not sure what all the other programs call it 
) Anyway, there should be something in there that will turn all your polys into triangles (though, I usually find it better to just make my models out of triangles. Sometimes the function will pick some strange patterns for the tris and they shade weird). Also, if nothing else, I know OpenGL can go and do it for ya, too, but it''s simply just more efficient to have the model already done that way (no reason to spend the cycles doing something that could be done beforehand). Hope this helps at all. Sorry I could give you a specific for your program, though!
Brian
) Anyway, there should be something in there that will turn all your polys into triangles (though, I usually find it better to just make my models out of triangles. Sometimes the function will pick some strange patterns for the tris and they shade weird). Also, if nothing else, I know OpenGL can go and do it for ya, too, but it''s simply just more efficient to have the model already done that way (no reason to spend the cycles doing something that could be done beforehand). Hope this helps at all. Sorry I could give you a specific for your program, though!Brian
I wrote a tut on making good models in under 20$ with gmax. its at my site. Go to the tutorials section and click on making good models in under $20. It explains everyting. Here''s my site.
All faces in max and Gmax (and all other 3d programmes) are 3 sided polygons.. its just that edges are hidden so they look like quads and such (such as when you make a defualt box, or sphere, cylinder ect) since the less visable stuff the programme has to draw in the view ports the better for you ^_^. If you export your models to .ASE .DFX or .3DS all this hidden edge informaiton should be lost. If you want to see all the edges in max just collapse the mesh so its editable and just go into edge mode select teh entire mesh and click the "visable" button. What you see in Gmax and max wont realy matter in the end, since all the hidden edge information will be removed on exporting to a file type that would be used in a converter to create the final usable ingame model file anyway.
its just good to see all teh edges so you can see what your dealing with... nothing more annoying than noticeing an area of quad polygons and realiseing theres far more polygons there than you originaly thought by just looking at teh mesh in the viewport.
All i tend to start out with is a box, collapse it, go to edge mode, make all the edges visable then i start to place vertices where i want them and construct the model face by face. This way you dont get any hidden edges, unless you start dividing edges or use the "create polygon" button, which can be easily fixed by just selecting all the edges and hitting "Visable".
Doesnt realy matter though about what you see in the veiwports, its all 3 sided faces.
its just good to see all teh edges so you can see what your dealing with... nothing more annoying than noticeing an area of quad polygons and realiseing theres far more polygons there than you originaly thought by just looking at teh mesh in the viewport.
All i tend to start out with is a box, collapse it, go to edge mode, make all the edges visable then i start to place vertices where i want them and construct the model face by face. This way you dont get any hidden edges, unless you start dividing edges or use the "create polygon" button, which can be easily fixed by just selecting all the edges and hitting "Visable".
Doesnt realy matter though about what you see in the veiwports, its all 3 sided faces.
Are you refering to the "Torque" (www.garagegames.com) engine when you say Tribes2? If you aren''t... then you should 
There is no plugin for the Torque engine to import/export from gMax to the engine unfortunately. The first game I know of that will be coming out retail with gMax support is Dungeon Siege.
I can''t even remember what gMax exports to anymore, it can''t even load 3dsmax .max files :\
Best of luck
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Black Hole Productions
President/Programmer/Expert on stuff
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There is no plugin for the Torque engine to import/export from gMax to the engine unfortunately. The first game I know of that will be coming out retail with gMax support is Dungeon Siege.
I can''t even remember what gMax exports to anymore, it can''t even load 3dsmax .max files :\
Best of luck
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Black Hole Productions
President/Programmer/Expert on stuff
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