Sliced & Diced

Ive stripped the Tangara back to bare metal and sliced it up a little. This will allow me to break the texture maps of the body into smaller chunks so that I can get a better resolution on the texture itself. It will also help when it comes to constructing the remaining carriages.

Now that I have finally figured out how to UVW Map the body, I removed all of that, and using the Slice tool, cut the body into thirds (Kind of like they did to the 4D, if you ever saw Ian Green's "after" pictures). I then spent a few hours hand optimizing the cuts to reduce the poly count as much as possible. Together the two slices ended up adding about 80 polys.

Next, I will redo the texture map from scratch, since there are now more maps / materials to work with.

Along its length, the body was essentially one piece. I could divide the maps horizontally into walls, roof, floor etc, but I still had to fit the full 20 metre length across a single 1024 pixel texture. I didnt want to use a larger texture, so this gave me a resolution of about 20mm per pixel, which was not good enough for lettering or fine detail. I can now bring that down to around 6mm per pixel, which although not perfect, is a big improvement.

File Version: 384
Poly Count: 17631

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, jigs, and other pieces which may not be part of the final model. LOD modelling will further reduce in-game polygons.