nephilim

why are you rendering with mentalray anyway for some simple wireframe shot? Â rendertimes are insane with that thing...

@Stewy id desaturate that camo a bit, it looks a bit to vivid. also add a good portion of dust, elsewise this camo will have camouflage charateristics, similar to acu ( to be precise... like a scotsman´s hairy arse in a searchlight).

Prolly to help the tank out of a mudhole. nice a bit clean imho, but its a very nice base to start some wear and tear!

http://sjb.gotf.net/hosted/mercsOFPbetaV.1.0.rar be sure you read the read me one more note unit tom and eric use bis heads atm i wasn able to map them properly.. for v.2.0 they will have UAP heads

well if youd at last would use some hi poly derived normal maps i could show you some more trickery for the FPS you can really leave alot away or simplify it as the vision on that thing is limited anyway. cheers!

can we have a macgyver??

busted again...

well i just hope its yours this time..

Roger that.

Need any help on the diemacos´? i have some time on my hands, much reference material and a L119A1 aeg sitting on my desk would be a shame if youd skip them for UKSF as theyre basically mandatory.

thanks for the constructive input wipman.... sure helps alot..

nice progress! personally i dont like all those black "dirt" shadows youve put on the texture. theyre too massive and busy looking. i´d say give it a try and lighten up those shadows. cheers

sounds like a plan basic thumbrule: as much as needed, as low as possible.

@plaintiff theres too much going on for an exterior lod. all the gauges and knobs can be saved up for normal maps and texturework for a 3rd person view. as and 1st person lod, the interior detailing is too low. i also dont like the tires too much.. they dont have a real volominous feel about them. also the tire caps can be optimized by merging pairs of verts on the 2nd row. other than that, its a nice clean mesh.

oh my oh my.. that low polymodel is somewhat unoptimized :P also, that hipoly model might have nice beveled corners... but some parts arent round at all, eg around the magwell/trigger guard. this only leads to the normal map basically "copying" the lowpoly structure, whereas it could immitated a nice and round structure. did you add a turbosmooth to that hipoly or did you bake the normals out of that directly? the soft thing edge will work only to an extend. if your LPO´s (low poly object) adjectant polygons have an angle that exceeds 45° (depens on how the actualy arma engine is programmed) you no matter what will get normal errors even if you applied a normal map. so either you leave out such details and apply the hi-poly derrived normal onto a simpler surface or you bevel the LPO´s edge where it necessary and only to an amount that helps to get rid of the normal error. i can illustrate that if its bit hard to understand.

the method doesnt matter, as it changes from model to model. in general i have the feeling i can produce something in modo faster than in max.

lol count me in modo is pretty fast. 3ds Max and Maya do well too, but theyre too complicated for beginners (as you said... too many buttons, too confusing). however if youd spend some time in it, you can use just as fast as modo. personally i use both, as i like or as i need. buti prefer modo for plain modelling, since its faster and has an a lot better inbuild render, which is even faster than the max or maya renderer. so in terms of modelling. use what serves you most.

dito. theres no need for such thing... think about it again.. in RL you need to zero a scope each time you put it on.. that would be pretty stupid during a fire fight... also with a grenade launcher.. it takes quite a while to put it on... however it might be more clever to do this whilest doing the briefing. its sure is possible, i just wouldnt bet BIS would do something like this..

Very nice. Show use some wireframes.

As i said bout polycruncher, i dont really know how it works, just heard about it. yea some :P its all about how you work

!!PROTEST!!  no offense taken mate  thing is, that the whole LOD thing has been covered pretty extensively in the past in OFP days, which in arma didnt really change (the reso lods). breaking down models to lower levels isnt that hard even in oxy. despite the fact that you mostlikely gonna screw the mapping of the existing model. anyway afaik theres a nifty tool called polycruncher. i havent tested it and cant say how well it works. of course, but as i said if you maintain edgeloops, reduce them eg by each 2nd edgeloop on your model you can get really fast results. making the mesh efficient out of that is easy then.

in my eyes: -much better AI implementation (the ai just screws around) -MUCH BETTER CQB characteristics (walking inside houses is basically impossible with an aimed weapon) -controls are very.... inaccurate and i just mean the movement -gunturrets on planes ( i still dont get why this is such a big problem if the guys are able to add more turrets to choppers or other vehicles.. and the community is after this for ages.... FFS) -use newer graphic technologies BETTER, atm its just laughable and just poorly implemented... - give full SDK support... eg animation /wheigting/rigging plugins and such - oxygen needs to be more friendly with formats honestly if BIS screws that on hte upcoming release i really dont see how this is supposed to work in the future... even game-nazi´s like EA have better support that stuff already drove me mad in arma...

Theres no need for a lod tutorial.. if you maintaing proper edgeloops upon modelling you could derive all the LOD from the hi poly model, just by deleting edgeloops.

mesh density is very important on sculpting mate. eg if you have higher densities in some areas than in others you might get very fine scructures in one spot but very sluggish ones in areas where the polys arent dense and even enough, which will might render delicate scratches into really broad valleys. the topolgy basically goes together with the density. at this point you would be forced to create a new hipoly model just for the sculpting part, as editing your current low-poly would eat up just as much time. depends on your uv if you unwrap it before sculpting its no prob, but if you let zbrush do the UV its just a plain mess... anyway go ahead and see what you come up with. sculpting on hardsurfaces makes sense of course and everyones got a different approach on that matter. but boosting up the mesh density to be able to sculpt such small details is pretty perfomant. aside from that, such things are really barely visible in terms of zbrush vs ps. aside from that.. zbrush sucks hard.. give mudbox a go

you might also try to apply a disp or bump map onto the hi poly model and then bake the normals onto the lowpoly. this gets the orientation right without having to worry about the normals channels.