Help with Vera Thread

Hey everyone,
I'm very new to the modding community and I was hoping you could help me with my model.

Here's what I have so far

This model is 7954 triangles. I'm hoping to put this model in Half-life 2 (Episode 2). I don't know what is a good number of triangles for a gun. 8000 seems pretty high, but I don't have a real reference point. I wanted to add more detail to the gun mag, but when I saw how many triangles, I thought I would hold off and ask people who know what their doing. Also, should there be more geometry on the bullets/shells? I kept it low because I figured they are just for affect and don't actually add anything to the gun.

Also, I did the boring on the muzzle using the "difference" boolean operation in XSI Mod Tool. I saw it added a bunch of needless geometry. Is there any easier way of doing that?

Thanks for your help!

cool gun cool/weird clip concept to
8k triangles is pretty high indeed, alyx was in the area of 8k-10k triangles

Thanks!
Any idea how I can lower the polygon count without making the gun look horrible?
I really want it to look awesome in-game.

you could try normal maps for ingame
euhm you could make the ribs on the handle and the stock flat and let the texture handle it
same for the holes on the surpressor on the front, the holes on the stock
the handle won't be seen well so you could remove the detail from there

think logicaly, if it can be handled by a texture/normal map witouth it looking bad, then do it
if the player won't see it (for first person models) then make it as low detail as possible or just remove it

try changing the geometry and recount the polys

Vera = awesome. To bad she wasn't in the movie.

some of that detail could most likely be done via bump mapping. So the more detail the better when using a model to make the bump map off of. Not sure the procedure for HL2 as D3 does that via the engine.

Are you going to replace weapon SFX with Jane's voice too? Making comments & such?

Sigma wrote: you could try normal maps for ingame
euhm you could make the ribs on the handle and the stock flat and let the texture handle it
same for the holes on the surpressor on the front, the holes on the stock
the handle won't be seen well so you could remove the detail from there

Well, the gun will have two models, the model for picking it up (same as the one when another player sees you holding it) and the in-hand model.
I'm not too worried about the in-hand model because I'll be able to cut it in half an only render the polys that the player sees.

It's a good idea about using normal mapping. I didn't know that HL2 could handle normal/displacement mapping. Can XSI genereate the normal maps, or do I have to make them in photoshop or something like that?

Right now the front four elements have a total of 2400 triangles. I just want the model to look its best.

I just got the NVidia normal map filter for photoshop. I'm going to look for some tutorials for it online. I'm really new to this so I'll also have to figure out how to import and apply normal-maps inside xsi.

@TheHappyFriar
Yeah, the gun is awesome and a blast to model. My biggest concern with bumpmapping is that it looks like crap from the side. Since this model will be held with the side always visible, it will look bad. I'm still looking through my sound effects for the actual rifle sounds. I really want a muffled howitzer. Since the only time the gun was fired in the show was in space (where there is no sound) I think I can get away with it :-)

I'm also going to go a little crazy on the ragdolls, since this is going to be a top-tier weapon. I have talked with my "in-town" friends and we'll be doing the voice acting for now. :-) Still, I'll make sure it doesn't sound like a 12 year old in the school play.

Thanks for the comments!

Edited by: Follower46

Odds are the reason it doesn't look great is due to Source & not what you're doing. Source doesn't have dynamic shadows like D3, UT3 & other engines where a nice normal/bump map can make it look awesome. Hence the higher-poly models in Source games/mods to get as much detail.

Any chance you'll want to hand out a finished .obj so others could try to put it in other games? Maybe even put it under GPL so if I, for example, make it for Doom 3 I need to let anyone else use what i did.

TheHappyFriar wrote: Any chance you'll want to hand out a finished .obj so others could try to put it in other games? Maybe even put it under GPL so if I, for example, make it for Doom 3 I need to let anyone else use what i did.

Once I get the model fully textured I'll look at the GLP or one of the other open source liscense. I'm working on quite a few weapons/objects from that show.

Just curious, if there is only one of these in the game, is it a bad thing that it's 8k triangles? Isn't that the same thing as just one more character on the screen? I understand the principle of it all, but I was looking at the smg from hl2, and it has 3k triangles in the player view (only rendering half the gun) and that would be about what this gun will have.

if it's ~the same as the previous stuff I'd say no worries then.

what you could do for the muzzle to save a LOT of polygons is make it a cylinder & use a texture with an alpha channel in it for the holes. Use another cylinder on the inside with the same texture so it does't look hollow.

err, what movie is it from?:p

it's from the TV show "FireFly". Wasn't in the movie. It a gun where the character (jayne I think, spelled it wrong up above) gave a long speech about how special that gun is to him, then offered it to the ship's captain as a trade for his wife.

Edited by: TheHappyFriar

dude how the hell did you do that its amazing

mobster103 wrote: dude how the hell did you do that its amazing

I just finished the texture work

6928 Triangles including the scope.

Let me know if anyone knows how to apply normal mapping in xsi.
It really has me confused. :-\

I just put vera in hl2 and everything is fine, but all the textures are over exposed. Would this be a material problem or something specific to how HL2 handles XSI models that I should account for some other way?