Dragoon (1)

[kharnov]

Hm. Can you make its posture closer to the ground? Like, spread the legs out a little bit wider? Maybe tilt the head down a little, too.

[Ishq]

The posture will be fixed when it is animated. This is a decent basepose. That's probably what the dragoon will look like when its jumping.

[kharnov]

Oh. Well, in that case, sure, it's fine.

[Viech]

The overall model looks fanatstic but I'm not sure about the leg plates. I can't imagine how it would make long jumps with those needle feet.

Maybe it would look good if the upper ends of the plates were a bit shorter and roundish like on our current goon model? Currently the legs remind me too much of the tremulous marauder. Since both alien forms jump and should share some genes, I'm not sure if that's really bad or just feels odd becaue I'm used to trem.

[kharnov]

Hm, I can see what Viech is saying. How about rounding off the pointed ends of the leg plates? Something more shield-like in shape, I suppose.

Also, in regards to texturing, any idea what sort of color scheme you'd like to use? You could go with something like our current model, or you can take it in a different direction. However, we'll need two skins: the regular form, and the advanced form. Basically, you can just palette swap it, the textures themselves don't need to be changed, just the colors. The advanced form of the dragoon is slightly larger and has different colors to distinguish itself, but the model is identical.

[mattberg]

okay, do you guys use tris or quads? With tris its about 9600 polygons and quads about 5000. Do you guys smooth or just soften the normals? And here is what it looks like with tris and a normal map so far in maya, I'll fix the legs.

Here it is quadded and smoothed:

[Fuma]

No GPU supports quads natively ( they would just get tessellated into tris before reaching it ), and support for quads in OpenGL was depreciated in 3.0 and removed in 3.1.

Therefore, we use tris for rendering.

Do you guys smooth or just soften the normals?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this.

We re-normalize normal maps when applying mipmapping.
We also calculate vertex normals, tangents, and bitangents during model load ( they are not stored on disk with the model ).

[Viech]

I don't know wether we decided on a polygon maximum, but 9600 sounds a bit high. Could someone who is into our engine/current models give a statement on that so mattberg doesn't need to redo stuff later on?

[kharnov]

Our tyrant is over 10k tris, so it doesn't matter that much. 9.6k is acceptable. Any reductions would be fine, but they're not critical.

[Ishq]

Tyrant is 9.7k. 9.6k is workable, though, you should try to reduce as much as possible.