Stuff I make

[Synaesthesia]

There was no intention that I'm aware of. It was always a relatively cartoonish art design from the beginning before they scrapped everything and built Renegade as it is now.

[Guest rackz]

well renegade originaly was far more advanced then its now. you could drop tanks from a map to your location, have animated HUD, vehicle entering animations etc. but after EA rushed them it went out totally diffrent. the e3 had shuttering lags, but why ea rushed them in a totally new game i dont know.

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yes aircraftkiller because of the non cartoonish style i prefer to make a new mod. i dont know how much time you got and how far your character skills are, but i would like to see a new w3d based mod. maybe TT magivally fix the textures issue someday.

 

also your texture style combinated with post processing effects like sharpening could give w3d a totally new look: (wont even harm the engine)

 

Edited February 2, 2015 by rackz

[Bfranx]

Some old stuff I'm planning to send to Reborn, and potentially to someone here who's planning on building a Tiberian Dawn conversion that actually goes somewhere

ACK, you wound me.

 

Nice models though. I like the integration of the cutscene material into the lower level of the refinery.

[Guest rackz]

he has posted more pictures of the refinery interior on renegadeforums, i think it was the Noddingham topic.

[Synaesthesia]

What Noddingham was:

 

 

What it was being developed into:

 

 

 

 

[NodGuy]

This topic is awesome!

 

It would be pretty cool to see an old TD GDI or Nod base in a Reborn map with these models. Of course, they would have to be edited to make them look old and decaying.

[TeamWolf]

Your Refinery is still insane.

[Shnappz]

Anyone else really wanna play that map after a bit of touching up ?

[cfehunter]

Nice work. Not sure where 20k Poly's went but I imagine there is a lot more detail than is visible from a still.

Textures look pretty good to.

[Synaesthesia]

If you want to know where 20,000 went, I've attached a helpful wireframe for your consideration. :downs:

 

 

 

 

The landing gear articulates, as do the leading edge slats, the engine nozzle, the flaperons, tailerons, air brake, rudder, and the cockpit opens as well.

[GeneralCamo]

Ah, I remember when you were working on Noddingham. With the new features from scripts 4.2, it could feasibly be finished. Though, with a lack of players, it would be difficult. Also, the ancient tools are difficult to work with. I still have the original source files from fjords you gave me. I figured out that adding two more temps to the thing would corrupt everything, and stopped what I was doing with them. I don't remember what it was though.

 

Weren't you working on buildings for APB at one point? I know that radar dish for the airstrip came for the radar dome you began making for it.

[Synaesthesia]

I was going to remake all of the APB buildings until my offerings of free help were denied consistently. They're still using my 11 year old buildings as a consequence of that decision. As a result, I ended up making a good chunk of the TD buildings. If I were ever to continue that trend, I'd have to remake all of the vehicles. Here's the MRLS I painted at work. It's someone else's model, however, but you get the texture style I'd be going for with this project. I wouldn't be able to reuse this vehicle, though, as it's US government property now.

 

 

 

[Synaesthesia]

Here's some of the Renegade-quality models I've built and painted. These are limited to one 1024x texture for the main body of the vehicle and one 512x texture for the wheels, plus a 256x for the treads, if either wheels or treads are applicable. There's generally a maximum poly count of 800 triangles.

 

USCG Short Range Prosecutor:

 

 

 

GMC Topkick tree truck:

 

 

[Guest rackz]

it always impress me how the fuck you get this quality an pretty low size textures. and again, i would like to see another w3d mod by you.

[Synaesthesia]

My day job is nothing but making vehicles all day, every week of the year. I work with some very talented people whose advice I seek consistently in order to find new methods to improve the work I do. I'm pretty sure I could remake both the boat and the GMC and have both look substantially better with the same polygonal detail and texture sizes at this point.

[Synaesthesia]

Min F/A-18E flyvemaskine model på svensk farver.

 

[Guest rackz]

are you working on a mod or do you plan working on a mod? so you do work for military projects, how about public projects? its a shame doing non public work and im sure you would do fast work so a mod would be quite possible without waiting years to be released.

Edited February 15, 2015 by rackz

[Synaesthesia]

I'm helping the Hub people out currently. I have some ideas for a project, but anything I'm making will be usable in both UDK and Renegade.

As far as my work is concerned, everything here that isn't related to Renegade is something I've worked on at the office.

[Guest rackz]

starting something new would be interessting since your style differs alot from all projects.

[Jerad2142]

Here's some of the Renegade-quality models I've built and painted. These are limited to one 1024x texture for the main body of the vehicle and one 512x texture for the wheels, plus a 256x for the treads, if either wheels or treads are applicable. There's generally a maximum poly count of 800 triangles.

 

USCG Short Range Prosecutor:

 

 

 

 

GMC Topkick tree truck:

 

 

 

Those are some nice vehicles.

[danpaul88]

Got to say, the lo-poly six sided cylinders on the Topkick truck really stand out on that model.. especially when you contrast them to the nice smooth circular wheels and the circular thing on the back (which, bizarrely, has a hexa-cylinder inside it Oo).

 

Why did you choose to create nice smooth circles for some parts and hexa-cylinders for others? If it was a question of poly count, why not reduce the number of sides on the smoother parts slightly and bring the hexagonal ones up to match, for the sake of consistency?

[Synaesthesia]

That's because there's a hard 800 polygon limit for those older models. They're considered "generation 1" models and have strict limitations on texture sizes and usage. For the Topkick, the round parts of any portion of the vehicle are actually alpha maps. The wheels are capped with a single polygon using an alpha channel which gives the illusion of roundness - otherwise they'd be eight-sided cylinders. IIRC, the cable spool you're referring to actually has a hexagonal section in the center of it. If I had reference showing otherwise, I would've made that instead. ;-)

I'm not fond of Gen 1 models because of the limitations, but that's what our customer expects from us and it's consistent with the rest of the vehicles - for good or bad.

[Jerad2142]

That's because there's a hard 800 polygon limit for those older models. They're considered "generation 1" models and have strict limitations on texture sizes and usage. For the Topkick, the round parts of any portion of the vehicle are actually alpha maps. The wheels are capped with a single polygon using an alpha channel which gives the illusion of roundness - otherwise they'd be eight-sided cylinders. IIRC, the cable spool you're referring to actually has a hexagonal section in the center of it. If I had reference showing otherwise, I would've made that instead. ;-)

 

I'm not fond of Gen 1 models because of the limitations, but that's what our customer expects from us and it's consistent with the rest of the vehicles - for good or bad.

There is of course plenty of value to knowing how to make low poly models, there is a certain art when it comes to saving polys and still having the model look good. For example there are a lot of 3D models that I'd have bought from 3d modeling sites and put into ECW if it wasn't for the creator of them carelessly deforming a mesh or whatever they did to make something that could have been 1,000 polys 100,000.

[danpaul88]

So, if the wheels are actually squares with a mostly transparent texture, how do you handle the actual tread of the tyre? I can see that working for the sidewall, but I'm not aware of any way to use transparency to turn a 3d cube into a cylinder. Sorry if it's a dumb question, I'm just curious how you managed to make the tyres look nice and smoothly rounded without using a high poly count.

 

 

EDIT: Re-read your previous comment and realised what I missed. They actually are cylinders and you just hide it with the square cap with a circular texture... very clever trick. I wonder if we could use that in AR to smooth the edges of some of the tread wheels...

[Synaesthesia]

It's a very old technique that was even used in the beginning of Renegade (~1998 or so) - if you look at the old models that Eric Kearns gave me years ago, it becomes obvious. The Tiberium Harvester has wheel caps, for example. I don't see why you couldn't use it, but there is a tradeoff in performance with alpha maps vs geometry. With current modeling standards, I'd argue that wheels should be at least 20 sided but probably no more than 24 sided. It's very possible to have a similar polygon count to what you currently have by using textures to hide the lack of detail in the wheel hubs.

[danpaul88]

One of the problems AR faces is vehicles like the Apoc Tank which have an indecent number of wheels to drive its four tracks (are they even called wheels when they're driving tracks? I'm not sure if there's a proper name for them) so the number of polys required to make them all 20 sided is not insignificant...

[Jerad2142]

It's a very old technique that was even used in the beginning of Renegade (~1998 or so) - if you look at the old models that Eric Kearns gave me years ago, it becomes obvious. The Tiberium Harvester has wheel caps, for example. I don't see why you couldn't use it, but there is a tradeoff in performance with alpha maps vs geometry. With current modeling standards, I'd argue that wheels should be at least 20 sided but probably no more than 24 sided. It's very possible to have a similar polygon count to what you currently have by using textures to hide the lack of detail in the wheel hubs.

There is also a small trade off due to multiple draw calls used by the alpha cap and the tread for the rest of the wheel. In addition of the performance hit sometimes those alpha maps like to show up in front of static sorted meshes, we used to have an issue in ECW where the fans on one of the submarines used to show through the water (which is a 4 pass (with 2 textures on each pass) static sorted mesh).

[wolf]

Min F/A-18E flyvemaskine model på svensk farver.

 

 

Love this one

[Guest rackz]

im wondering if you have done some building models wich you are allowed to show- but some we didnt have seen in the c&c communitys yet. i would like to see some military buildings if you have made some.

Edited February 22, 2015 by rackz

[cfehunter]

I don't see why you couldn't use it, but there is a tradeoff in performance with alpha maps vs geometry.

In renegade the alpha map is probably a smaller cost than shading the tris for a full wheel mesh (assuming it actually depth sorts)

 

In a modern engine with deferred rendering the mesh would be quite a bit more efficient... Unless the overdraw is ridiculous..