Car poly's and vertex limits.

[bover907]

Another thing to keep into account when modeling your car is if you are going to damage model it. With the mod I made, at first my car was around 4000 polys. When I tried to make the damge model, it got to be over 9000. I wound up reducing my car to around 2500 polys, but then the damge model made the total poly count around 6500.

A great formula for good usability seems to be lower polys with better quality textures. A good picture of a 3D object on a flat plane looks just as good (if not better depending on where and how it's used) than the actual 3d model. That's how I made my dashboard. I made really good 3d models of guages in max, rendered them really nice, Then did some work on that pic in photoshop, and it looks better than cockpits I've seen where the guages are actually modeled in 3d. click the thumb to see what I mean.

In the above pic, the whole dash is a 2d image on a flat plane, as is the tach, shift light, and steering colum. all flat planes. The steering wheel model is actually a 3d model but to go back in time, I would have rendered that to a 2D image and put it on a flat plane too.

Then you take into account LOD's. After high 1 (or high 2 if your're really fussy) you could basically get away with removing all smoothing from your car since the result of the smoothing is invisible at that point anyway.

So really IMHO, there's no reason to have a car that's 15K polys. You'd never be able to see any detail greater than 6 or 7 thousand anyway.

Hope that helps.

[Administrator]

The problem on increasing 2D texture quality to "fake" 3D is that this needs to have high res textures to really look great. That's the reason why those ISI games all require high performance PCs - very high res textures all over

Putting more detail to 2D instead of 3D additionally requires superior 2D artist skills - especially on the cockpit, where you look at the textures from very close range. That cockpit of yours looks really great - but I'd never be able to get the same result in 2D. I simply lack the 2D skills.

And since there's always only one cockpit to be processed at the same time (no matter how many cars are on the track), high0/low0 is the LOD where I would care last about the number of poligons put in there.

I agree that running a 15k poly high1 model doesn't make any sense at all since all those nice details won't be visible at all. That's why there's LOD modeling. I've run A LOT of testing when I was working on SCGTS mod to check out what detail depth will be visible at what distance - and what not. So far as I have found, the limit for reasonable poly count would be somewhere between 4000 - 5000. All above IMO is for sure a waste of CPU performance as it will go unnoticed

The problem is just to put down a really nice model to lower poly count - always feels like destroying its beauty ;D

[jaremko]

Like said,there is indeed no need of 15k poly cars in games.
But at least i know that it can work with the heat engine and it works a lot better then GP4 where i got those cars from.
I managed to bring them down to 6000 and it looked great.
The bad thing is that after 2 months and several Emails i didn't get any answer at all from the original author.
This is the second time that this happened and i hate it.
If he don't want it then just say it but i get nothing.
Well i decided to make my own models.

[Administrator]

Yeah - that had happened to me with the F1C FIA GT cars too.
I had had in mind to convert these cars as they would have made a great addition to SCGTS mod - and that would have been a quick one

Never got a reply

One additional reason now to try working out superior 3D models than they have in that mod ;D

[bover907]

Thanks for the compliment, and I know what you mean, Colerix.

Actually I didn't have too many textures to speak of. That dash is only 1024x256, and was part of one single 1024x1024 pic for all the fine details of the cockpit.

If I had made a 4-square dash like heat's original cockpit, instead of the 2 rectangle version I did, all those nice guages could have been on a 512x512.

Nov 21, 2008 12:41:44 GMT 2 Administrator said:

That cockpit of yours looks really great - but I'd never be able to get the same result in 2D. I simply lack the 2D skills.

Well, mine aren't too too good either. I mean I do good on car paints, but painting realistic stuff? Ummmm NO. But, that's where I cheated. I just made and rendered those guages in Max, pasted them onto a leather texture, and drop shadowed them. One of those glorious 'lucky accidents'.

[Administrator]

Nov 22, 2008 13:17:31 GMT 2 bover907 said:

I just made and rendered those guages in Max, pasted them onto a leather texture, and drop shadowed them. One of those glorious 'lucky accidents'.

Never thought about that way of improving "fake" 3D effects... you're giving me some ideas here

[jaremko]

Could use that idea too.
Thanks for the hint.

[bover907]

Nov 22, 2008 13:34:20 GMT 2 Administrator said:

Never thought about that way of improving "fake" 3D effects... you're giving me some ideas here

The other beauty of it was that when I set the camera up (top view in max) it gave me the proper perspective so that if you look all the way to the right at the fuel pressure guage, it looks like you're looking at if from a slight left-offset angle. Just like in real life. I did my tire texture the same way, rendered the best top down shot from a high poly tire model, pasted a brake disk in a layer under that in photoshop, and got a great looking tire on a low poly tire model.

To go back and change time, I should have gone with half, or dare I say, a quater of the image size for my tire and still would have achieved very acceptable results, but you can see what I mean. That tire model has no more polys than heat's original.

The other beauty is that if you render the image as a tga, max also automatically makes the alpha channel (like on a rim or around those guages so I could copy/paste them onto the dash leather texture). It's a better/tighter alpha channel than what you can get with the magic wand in a paint program.

One of the reasons I took that approach with a lot of stuff was because someone told me that mod vid cards from the past 5 or so years do textures a lot better than more polys. I don't know if that's true or not, but It's what I thought then.

I just wish I knew some of the things a year ago when making this mod that I know now.

For instance, I strictly reduced polys in my lower LOD models. I din't know at the time the benifits of ditching the shine, etc. (I think all the way down to my High 8 & 9 'pinewood derby block' is just as shiney as the High1, lol).

[Administrator]

Nov 23, 2008 7:16:59 GMT 2 bover907 said:

someone told me that mod vid cards from the past 5 or so years do textures a lot better than more polys.

So far as I know, processing poligons is CPU work, not GPU. While all the rendering stuff is GPU work only. But then, with a lot of poligons, there's a lot of areas to render...

My main PC from 2001, CPU AMD Athlon 1800+ (single core !), vid card is a NVIDIA TI4200, 64MB - and that's my performance benchmark for modding ;D Only occasion ever it was notably slightly stuttering with NHeat was at start of a Lemans test race, all options enabled, 1200x1024 res, with 30 cars of SCGTS mod. Even that start went smooth after reducing screen res.

I've tried the same on non-LOD cars... was definitly less smooth
Made me decide to do the extra work of putting 9 high/6 low LODs to each CAR. The conclusion was "the more poligons in high1, the more LODs should be in"

[bover907]

Agreed on the LOD's. That's why I went thru the trouble of making 9 high and 6 low LOD's for my car, as well as Tire LOD's.

I would have never thought of tire LOD's until I read here at speedsims, a point about how important they were.

One thing I can't stand is a mod that used the same ultra high res model for all of the LOD's.

[Administrator]

Nov 24, 2008 14:46:57 GMT 2 bover907 said:

One thing I can't stand is a mod that used the same ultra high res model for all of the LOD's.

And there's QUITE of lot of these out there.
Even some where there a big waste of poligons on places where it doesn't even make any sense at all

Now since making all that LODs isn't much fun... actually it isn't any fun, it's just work.... those modders probably simply dropped the non-fun part of making a mod

[Administrator]

btw GREAT looking tire !

But I wonder what res the texture has - that looks THAT "crisp", it's had to believe that tire texture is anything less than 512x512

[bover907]

Well, remember I said, that to change time, I'd have gone with half or a quater of the size?

Well that tire image is about 600px across. It's again, part of a 1024 image which has the tread, back side of the tire etc. It could have definately been a 512 pic which would have made just the tire part 300 px wide. (remember, it was my first mod, and it was a learning experience. That's one of the things I learned, but too late because the big pic made it in the mod lol).

When I made my mod, rather than have a whole slew of smaller textures, I just had a few big ones. Couple 1024 and a couple 512's. These 3 or 4 textures have a whole slew of things in there. I also left a couple heat textures in there that I just mapped new stuff to. I had a cockpit texture which contained the dash, the ignition boxes, and some other stuff. I had a 256 tach tex, a detail tex which had the engine, rear wing mounts, underside, etc, and a misc one with other stuff like the shift light, steering colum, and more. I did get kind of sloppy there, and definately will be more discriminating with textures on any future mod I end up making.

[reg126]

From my experience with UK banger type cars which have extensive damage modelling on them the limits i have come to for working files seems to be a little over 8000 polys/verts.
We use pacecar for files rather than high/low.
Max amount of poly for the model in game at any stage of damage was about 1800 polys. Total poly count of model working satisfactory without crashing game was circa 8200. If raised to 8600 then the game crashed ..normally after one race. If over 9000 then the game crashed often before a race ..wether one car being used or more. The crash reasons being telemetry errors.