SIG Rascal

jeffpn said:
Wheel pants always take up polies on my models.

Everything looks so clean.

To get a poly count, combine all of your objects. In Face mode, select Tesselate|Triangulate. Looks like you have around 1,500 so far.
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Umm....:( I guess I need to do a lot of "clean up" and optimizing:eek: Right now as it sits I'm just at 9000! However keep in mind just for figuring that I duplicated the v-stab, rudder, h-stab and elevators just to get a rough figure for when I do the inner structure and outer skin.

I know I can clean up the wheel pants. I could also take away some polys on the rounded edge of the tail surfaces....I'd rather not do this as I already thought I was being fairly conservative there (I don't want a sharp / jagged leading and trailing edge on those surfaces)

I'm off to Easter now. I still think the plan is to keep modeling as I am, and later go back and remove / clean up when and where needed. At this point, it certainly looks like it's not going to have a visible engine! Sorry!
 
jeffpn said:
Wow. That poly count is quite surprising!
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Yeah I was kind of shocked, but also knew I was using a good amount (probably due to lack of recent "practice") I just did a test and I can easily gain about 500 (not much in the big picture) from the tail surfaces with not much of a visual loss.

Like I mentioned above, one thing that is costing me polys is the flat slab balsa tail surfaces (I thought at first that would be a good thing) however all the outside edges on the real model are a "half round" On a normal airfoil you are only using polys at the leading edge to get the shape....now I need to double it to get the trailing edge round. Add to that the elliptical shape of the tail surfaces and that is why they ate up a ton. (not to mention all the inner structure work as well)
 
jeffpn said:
Dane, if you're interested in the technique Andy mentioned, I can try to elaborate.
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I just got back from church, now headed to the in-law's for Easter.....but was curious if your technique is sort of like "loop cutting" out a window which I would normally than bake in the transparency. The difference here, would be applying the "loop cut" window out and applying it to the TGA on the alpha layer? Or is it totally different than that?

Attached is a pic of the bottom of the h-stab to show what I'm dealing with. As you can see the elevator (and rudder) are solid balsa covered with transparent. The h-stab is actually built up of 3 layers (inner core and outer sheets) there is a "step" between the inner and outer cores. Obviously this is all covered by transparent.

I really want to do a nice balsa wood grain under the transparent obviously.
 

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Make the wing as you normally would, forgetting that there will be internals. Draw edges to represent where the internals are. Duplicate the wing, same size, same place. Hide the original. On the duplicate, one section at a time, select the upper and lower faces that will be clear, and bridge them together. Bridge only works on 2 faces, so interior edges will need to be deleted by hitting backspace before bridging. Continue the process until all clear areas are bridged, and the framework is all that remains. Then select the tops and bottoms of the ribs, and make them holes. Make all bones faces that won't be seen holes. The tops and bottoms of the ribs are actually on the main wing, which is still hidden, right? Note how the main wing has 2 different materials associated with it. The .tga also has alpha over the entire .tga. In RF, only the material called ~CANOPY responds to the alpha channel, as you know. See this file for an example. Unzip both files to the same location.
 

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Thanks for that test file Jeff. I certainly grasp the concept now pretty much. Would you (actually the Maj.) then paint the top and bottom of the rib on the exterior wing skin?

Since I currently have 3/4 of the tail surfaces completed how I already started, I think I'll continue with that process (barring I don't run out of polys....at that point I would re-do it this method) However, I think I'll plan to do the main wing ribs using this method.
 
Yes, the tops and bottoms of the ribs are painted onto the main wing. And the beauty of it is that you can color outside the lines. Make sure you assign the ~CANOPY material only to the faces that will be clear skin. Give the rest of the wing another material. Each material is diffused with the same texture. Color the whole wing a solid color, and reduce it to about 10% Alpha, the whole wing. You'll see that the tops and bottoms of the ribs are opaque, and the clear panels are transparent.

I believe that this would be the lowest poly way to make bones. It also would have no z-fighting.
 
jeffpn said:
I believe that this would be the lowest poly way to make bones. It also would have no z-fighting.
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That is a good method. I on the other hand have found possibly the highest poly way to make bones!:D I'm gonna make an excuse for myself and say that the inner core "step" (the holes don't line up from top to bottom) through me for a loop, so I had to do it an overly complicated and wasteful way.....hope it works out in the end!
 

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That intermediate step down you did gums up the works for the method I described. Looks good, though.

Do you render inside of Wings? If so, let me know if you can do a render using an Alpha channel in the .tga to define transparency. I can't get that to work.
 
jeffpn said:
That intermediate step down you did gums up the works for the method I described. Looks good, though.

Do you render inside of Wings? If so, let me know if you can do a render using an Alpha channel in the .tga to define transparency. I can't get that to work.
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I only render my WIP's in wings (with no texture) I've never tried to render one once I've mapped and applied the TGA, (I do that in 3dsMax)
 
jeffpn said:
Do you render inside of Wings? If so, let me know if you can do a render using an Alpha channel in the .tga to define transparency. I can't get that to work.
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There is a shader script that Viennalex posted in the how to build your own models thread that allows Max to use the S_ & N_ tga files to render much as RF does.
 
Interesting. Wings has the _N and _S capabilities built in, with a caveat: you have to install 1 of 2 rendering programs for the function to work.
 
Not really unheard of. Many 3rd party renderers exist to do a better job then the default renderer. There is vray for max among others. Both blender and wings use yafray for finer results. The key is in the materials themselves. Each material has attributes that can be controlled by external images. Opacity for instance. You can go to the opacity attribute and apply the regular tga for the alpha layer to control the transparency. Same scenario for bump and spec control using the _s and _n maps.
This would be a fun topic for Toledo Friday night. ;)
 
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