Studio V
Rover Two - The Tank
I’ve finished modeling the rover for now, although things might change slightly. I ended up changing the neck and ditching the side supports entirely, which made the rover looked tidier and more stream-lined.
I was having an issue with the poly count, which initially was around 18,500 faces. I’m still learning the balance between modeling details and leaving them to be textured in, and a couple of times I’ve had to backtrack and delete a large part of the model to leave it for the textures, like the camera’s lens cap. I got rid of about 8000 faces by taking out a bunch of cylinders in the treads. I was trying to make it look more realistic, but the detail is rather small and mostly hidden, so I just hid the cylinders entirely and then deleted them.
There is currently 11,500 faces, most of which are still in the treads, but hopefully I’ve cut out enough of them for now. Apparently, most mid-level games have between 5,000 - 15,000 polys per character model. I’ve parented all the different objects together, and currently can move them all in a logical way, but I’m about to start animating. I’m trying to figure out if I can get away without using an armature, as currently all the center points for each object is in the right spot. I’d have to recenter the bones, which would take more time and I might not be able to line them up perfectly. I’d also have to probably combine all the separate objects into one object, which then makes it difficult to select individual components.
I also realised, at some point, I’d managed to create literally a thousand materials. Creating the wheels meant a lot of copying and pasting, and I think each pasted section created a new material as well as keeping the old one. Fortunately this was pretty easy to fix, if somewhat tedious.
I’ll try both ways, figure out which ones easiest, and get animating. I want to have a basic walk animation done by next Monday, which I don’t think will take too long once I’ve figured out what I’m doing, I’ve just got to actually figure out what I’m doing first.
