Clear to proceed

I am tentatively proceeding with the animating and filming of the rest of the scenes for The Battle for Axis Muni. The model that I was texturing is presentable, so instead of spending hours agonizing over how I can't get it's texturing to look better, I am starting to animate it. After all, I can always fix the textures later if I feel like they absolutely need to be improved.

Tweaked Out

Well, I may have alluded to being close to finished before, but now it is official. I am finished modelling the model I was modelling. Now I am going to import it into RCT3 to make sure it will work. It has a lot more vertices than the Warrior of Light model. That model has 306 vertices. The model that I just finished has 8,333 vertices before subdivision, (that means 8,333 is the number of vertices that I worked with by hand) and after one subdivision (to make it look a little smoother) it has 33, 679 vertices. Using those numbers, the new model has 110 times more detail than the Warrior of Light model. That shouldn't be a problem for the RCT3 engine to handle, because I have done crazy experiments before where I have hundreds of the same Warrior of Light animation going at the same time. It does lag a little bit, but nothing that would crash the game.

Here's an interesting tidbit: at one point I was considering doing two subdivisions on the model instead of just one. That would give the model 134,341 vertices, which is 439 times more detail than the Warrior of Light model. I don't think I've ever successfully had that many WOL models in one park before (although I haven't tried), so I decided to step it back a notch for performance sake. And honestly, when it comes to sub-surfacing, there are rapidly decreasing returns for each successive division, so even if it would run in RCT3, it's a little silly to have so many vertices define such a simple shape.

So yeah. Done with the thing I started modelling ages ago. November 2010... was it? ...Nope, just checked and it was..... 0_o....... October 2010!

That's right, the model that I just finished is the model that I first mentioned in this post.

Man am I ever dragging this film out.

Completion of the Upper Body

So it turns out that I was a lot closer to finishing the arms than I thought. Now The Warrior of Light's upper body is completely textured. Check it out!

Here's a look at the UV map:

Like I mentioned in my previous post, it's kinda like patchwork. And allow me to take a moment to emphasize the WORK in patchwork. This was definitely a challenge for me, because I had never done any UV mapping before this. There was a lot of editing in Photoshop, then looking back in Blender then editing in Photoshop then.... You kinda get the picture. Anyway, hopefully I'll get better at it and the whole process will speed up a bit.