Barded Horse model

Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Barded Horse model

Matty(Posted 2004) [#1]
Here is a picture of a model I made tonight of a barded warhorse in Milkshape3d. It has a skeleton and some (poor) animations. I am thinking of making a strategy game based loosely on an ancients-medieval wargame known as DBA.




Caff(Posted 2004) [#2]
8-o


BlackJumper(Posted 2004) [#3]
You wont have to worry about loud noises scaring the horse on the battlefield... he's a bit short in the ear department !!

How many polygons ya got there ? (And could you afford to throw in some more for 'essential' details ?)


Matty(Posted 2004) [#4]
The horse is 426 polygons. However I have this morning made a lower level of detail horse with 125 polygons. Given I have a very old PC I am unable to really increase the number of polygons without incurring very large slowdowns.


N(Posted 2004) [#5]
... 0_o

Nice job for 426, I guess, but dang man, get a new PC. I can't possibly imagine how many games you don't get to play because of it :P


Jager(Posted 2004) [#6]
Nice work Matty but I gave up trying to create an animated horse as a bad joke .. especially when I found that Horse Essentials has one for $20!!!

see
http://www.blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=3623


NTense(Posted 2004) [#7]
Hi Matty.. Pretty nice for that low poly. Following up on Jager's plug
(thanks Jager ;-))
, Horse Essentials is a little over 1400 polys, and 7 animation cycles that you can view at my website or by clicking here. The files include the original Milkshape files, so even if the poly count was too hi, you might be able to rip the skeleton and animations to place on your model. Just a thought


Jager(Posted 2004) [#8]
Ntense , I'm still awaiting a low-pol animated Horse ... :\

I've tried stripping the hi-pol horse down in Milkshape but quickly lose the animations.

The one unit of 12 horsemen in my game, chews up the FPS. I've tried putting in a low-pol static horse when the camera is a certain distance away .. which kinda works but doesn't look that good.


Matty(Posted 2004) [#9]
How many polygons would be classed as a low polygon horse?


NTense(Posted 2004) [#10]
I worked this morning a bit on the horse model, and have it to a little over 600 polys at this point.. How low were you looking to go Jager?


NTense(Posted 2004) [#11]
I got it down to 556, and am in process of re-applying the skeletal anims.. I'll post as soon as I've got it done.


Jager(Posted 2004) [#12]
300 would be good, remember it doesn't have to look good because it's for long distances .. but 500ish sound ok - thanks.

You artistic types are sush Perfectionsits. I'm the same way, My soldiers started life looking excellent but ended up as animated boxes to increase speed! :)


Matty(Posted 2004) [#13]
I don't know if you are interested but here is another horse I made, which I am no longer going to use, which has 125 polygons.




Jager(Posted 2004) [#14]
thanks matt but the hard thing is the realistic animations .. getting a horse to move like a horse.

I'll leave that to the experts. I'm having a hard enough time trying to get my soldiers to act human :)


NTense(Posted 2004) [#15]
OK, here's the 556 poly horse pic:



And here's the link to the animation of it.
Jager, I'll shoot you a copy.. Let me know if it makes a difference in your frame rate at all (it's 3x lower polygon resolution than the original). Something that may be churning the framerate is the skeletal structures.. I've heard some people say that processing the skeleton chews up some cycles. Have you considered billboarding?


Jager(Posted 2004) [#16]
thanks .. what's bill boarding? advertising for a mesh artist to do my warriors?

I've thought about it but I've already done alot of work and their 80% finished.

sorry to hog your thread Matt :)


Matty(Posted 2004) [#17]
I think it means using quad meshes instead of more complex models, like in say Shogun:total war


NTense(Posted 2004) [#18]
Jager, another thing you might try doing is CopyEntity, and create "clusters" of units. For example if you had 3 "instances" of a calvary units A, B, and C, and then you copied them so you have a "formation" like so:

A B C B
C A B A
B C A B
A B C A

or something like that. That way you have 3 different animation surfaces, so essentially 3 meshes, but 16 different units. I don't know if that made sense or not, but it boils down to reducing the number of Surfaces the computer is churning through, and animating only 3 surfaces instead of 16 separate ones. Your combinations could be pretty huge by sacrificing 4 or 5 surfaces.