Terran Mercenary Goliath

[Shadowhisperer]

This is the result of an experiment that was a complete success! Essential I imported the fully textured Mercenary Goliath game model from Starcraft II into 3DS Max 2012 and used it as a base reference for blocking out the innitial proportions. I then moved the low poly game model off to the side then used its 2D textures as reference for modeling all the detail before deleting it from the scene!



I am very proud of the resulting model and cannot wait to start texturing it! The one problem however is... it is 7000k polygons.



Essentially I modeled every last detail because it was so much damn fun but the chances of a studio using a 3D model this dense is next too nill. Even with no subdivision the sheer detail puts the model at 1.1 million polys. However in the coming month as I texture its 140+ objects, 500+ elements. I hope to bring its poly count down to hopefully 2 million at the most.

I will render some closeups of the really detailed parts later after school so that they can be seen better so that I can get a better critique. So what do you think, what could I improve on, and any tips for modeling high amounts of detail without going off the ball in terms of poly counts? Also what do you think of the concept of importing game models directly into 3DS Max to use as on an demand reference in the absence of orthographic 2D sheets?

Thanx.

P.S. None of the game model's geometry was used in the construction of this.

[Shadowhisperer]

Got the detail shots. Also it appears I did not turn off the subdivision of every object and my model then comes to 390,000 polys instead of 1.1 million.

[parleee]

Not bad, clays have some excessive creases, and it could do with quite a bit more detail, but it's a good start.

Also, by detail I don't mean more paneling, paneling is cool, but it really doesn't add much to the model. Even if you're using an established concept as a base, you'd be better served to build a small number of complex, interesting parts, than a large number of simple parts with tons of small detail on top of it. If the overall shape is boring, people won't want to look close and see all the little glitter. Form is infinitely more important than detail. Try to keep just about everything to curved, or at least angled shapes. Perfectly flat-sided models are a bad idea, as most of the surface detail you labour to create just get eaten up by big spec highlights anyway.

Try to keep your poly-size more consistent too. A lot of the simple pipes on the guns are way denser than they need to be. (Try to avoid repetitive detail too, it's a bit boring.) Just get into the habit of optimizing as you go and you'll be fine.

All in all it's a promising model, keep it up.

[Shadowhisperer]

Thankyou for the info. I was thinking it could have used a little somethng and now that you put it into plain words I can begin to work on that.

Thanx!