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Simulated Chains - Twisted Boxes vs Polygon Count

A

AFTRS

Messages
180
Country
spain
Hi,

I am designing my own objects piece by piece.
Today a couple of water towers.

The example taken was the left big tower in the picture below.

wasserturm.jpg


The small little tower not textured yet is my new object.

The big one is from the generic library of either ADE9X or MS-FS. It is called Generic.BGL 182 in the LOM of ADE9X.

As I am always very concerned about polygon numbers i always wondered why it is consuming that much memory and frame rates.

Next to the above the little grey one is mine.
What they did just guessing concerning the anchor chaines it is making use of twisted boxes.

If one does that it means to implement a huge number of hight segments for each twisted box.

I think you might need for the big tower 40-60 hight segments for each "chain" to get the twist done.

My simple tower went from 37 KB to 273 KB, just as a single instance, no LOD instance for at least 100-50-10 %. And it is just using 12 "Chaines".

Any better ideas one could implement it?
 
The Microsoft watertower is using a texture with an Alpha-channel to simulate the iron girding and chainwork. The actual model's base is solid.

Untextured:

untexturedwt.png


Textured:

texturedwt.png


Dick
 
P.S.
Didn´t knew that tool above.
Just downloaded it now.
Wouldn´t have asked if i had known.
So, your reply was in more than one way more than helpfull.
Again, Thanks a lot!
 
Hi,
today I did spent something like an hour or so into the tower:

chained.jpg


6 planes double sided with alpha channel. Not jet perfect on the right side, but thats no problem.
Used an raytracer to generate the bitmap, needed some smal changes in Bit Mode from RGB 111 to 000 for the alpha channel.

Using an raytracer if you do not own 3DSMax is very convinient. For eample talking about Night-Texturing. Much easier than any grafik tool. Depending on the light-Sources sometimes it does need some bitmap-manipulation.
If anybody interested in that I could write a small manual. I am using POVRay and Moray as an 3D-Interface. They are for free.
Moray works very similar to GMAX but it has some advantages. It exports then to POVRAY which has a much better raytracing engine.
 
Hi AFTRS.

It looks very good. And please, a tutorial of your raytrace to bitmap technique would be much appreciated.

Dick
 
I'm also kind of a tool junkie, so would be interested in reading what you are doing. I did find and install POV-Ray 3.6. I know there are various renderer plug-ins for Sketchup which I have been playing with but most or all seem to be payware so I haven't investigated too much since I didn't see the applicability. I'm guessing what you are doing is creating a highly detailed geometry which you can than perform simple texturing operations on, then rendering to create a complex texture for use on a simplified geometry? I can see benefit in particular if it makes creating the night map version easier than in a paint program, though it would also be nice to generate a bump and/or specular map for FSX material use.

scott s.
.
 
Totaly correct, that´s the idea behind it.
Today I am working on a wooden tower with stairs. Went by doing it with "real" stairs from 7.9 KB to something like 459 KBs untextured.
Now I changed it to a complex raytracing object in Moray and did for each of the 4 sides a different rendered xxx.bmp, deleting the things I didn´t want to have.
Switched of "causing shadows" of the light sources, because it is done by FS.
Then I copied each side into the FS-bitmap-texturing file.
So I again ended up with 4 Polygon (as planes) in GMAX doublesided.
If you adjust the 4 sides correctly it really gives you the impression of beeing 3D. You can´t see a difference until you are "IN" the object with "Y" in FS.
This is fooling around what is reality and what you think you are seeing.
OK, a little bit "tricky craftmen´s ship" to get all of the four sides exactly matching in the FS-Bitmap and then apply them to the 4 planes in GMAX.
But it works, may be some attempts are necessary for that.
Wouldn´t like to do that with any "normal" grafic tool.

P.S.: some pictures of the process for the water tower. Placed it with factor 2 into the scene.

towerraytracing.jpg
 
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