Tangara Progress

Ive started texturing the Tangara. As you can see I havnt done much. so far I have been experimenting and trying to figure out how to break it up into smaller chunks for mapping. Unless youve read my earlier posts, you might not realise that this is my first major Gmax creation, so I am still figureing out how to best apply complex textures.

All the tweaking of the model is done. Ive finished the drivers cab (except for the detailed "cab mode" view), and Ive finished the Train Stop trip arm, thanks to the photos I took recently. The only part of the model that still needs to be finished is the intercar gangway.

I started on the gangway again, and had it all figured out. I was making progress, and then Gmax crashed, so its back to its original form and I will do it again later when I have time. I did try to save my work, but ended up with an unreadable file, so if you're not using versioned saves (and from all the "I lost my gmax file" forum posts, I know that many arent) you should be! It took me all of 30 seconds to recover the previous save, and I only lost a few minutes work.

Back to the texturing... I textured the windows first, and thought I'd be clever and tint them in Gmax without using a texture file (thus saving resources), but apparently the Trainz exporter requires all surfaces to have a UVW map, which implies a texture file, so I will see what I can figure out. The dark windows look darker in this picture due to the angle and specular lighting. They're not so dark on the model, and the specular lighting makes them shine, even in Gmax's simple viewport rendering.

So far, the body is covered in a simple white texture, and I am now trying to select areas to create the UVW maps. Figuring out the mappings is difficult, but Im getting there. Ive reduced the number of visible edges so that I can select whole areas as a single polygon. This helps me set up the UVW mapping, and as I get the areas selected, I assign a material ID to them. Once I have the body mapped out, I'll edit the texture file to add some detail.

Im going to use Lithunwrap to create a bitmap showing the UVW mapping, and will convert that to a TGA and then finally use The Gimp to draw in some detail. Ive seen tutorials that suggest using a screen shot as the bitmap, but to me that approach lacks finesse. While my approach involves a lot of messy exporting and file conversion, I will end up with texture files that map directly to the pixel!! You cant get much better than that.

On another subject, Ive been struggling with what to do about poly counts. I like to post them here as it shows progress as the model gets more complex, but I dont want to scare people off, since there are usually more polys in the work-in-progress than will be in the finished model. Estimating the final count was not working - from week to week, I couldnt remember what I had included in previous counts, and what I hadnt.

I decided to not post poly counts, but felt that the posts had lost that progress indicator, and then I read some comments from PaulHobbs who said something along the lines of: "Beware creators who wont tell you the poly count of their models", and I agree, so I have decided to post the in-progress count, as displayed by the Gmax poly counter, along with a disclaimer which hopefully explains the situation. Ive set this up as a template so it should become fairly standard.

I havnt added thousands of polys since the last count (ok... maybe one thousand) - Ive just stopped subtracting all the bits that will be separated or excluded from the main in-game model when its exported.

File Version: 369
Poly Count: 18139

Note: The poly count shown here is for the gmax model in progress. The count will generally be higher than that of the finished in-game model since it includes various tools and other pieces which may not be part of the final model. LOD moddelling will be used to further reduce in-game polygons.