LOD

Can you spot the difference?

Of course you can, but the thing is that from a distance the cars look pretty much the same. This would be convenient if you have multiple viewing ranges, where as you zoom out the higher polygon count models will switch to the lower polygon model. This is called "Level of Detail" or lod models.

This way you could render way more cars on screen or make more room to render the larger environment.

From a distance, the low poly version even reads better, because there is less detail that will start 'jittering' and some elements have been emphasized to enhance the look from far away.

anyway, maybe for next post ill make something new... or maybe not...

Little car texture

I originally didn't want to post today but I couldn't resist taking a shot at the texture!

It's very basic but I couldnt think of more detail that was necessary. When I made this texture I was thinking... where would the damage be on this car? Like rusty spots and things like that.

The answer is pretty simple, since I ride the car to work every day, the front of the car gets hit by little stones that get catapulted in the air by cars and trucks in front of me. So I focused the damage on the front. Because this vehicle is only occasionally used the spots have time to start rusting. I could have added more dirt and birds dung... maybe.

A mistake that often gets made is adding damage and scratches to textured object without thinking what might cause the damage in the first place, this usually makes the texture unnecessarily cluttered, random and basically lifeless.

Anyway this is one of the many things I am thinking about when putting work into texturing amongst other stuff that hasn't got anything to do with texturing, like... food...

Done for today!

Little Car Uv's

Hello there

This evening I've finished the UV's for the car and added some more small details here and there... like the exhaust pipe and window rain thing.

For now I've placed a 64x64 pixels texture on the model as a reference to see how far the different UV islands are to be placed apart. This means, that if I leave one pixel between the different UV's on a 64x64 texture, that I would have 2 pixels working space with a 128 pixels texture. Working this way helps me in optimizing the UV's for in a 3D engine so that even when Mip mapped and filtered, the texture seams will not be visible.

Even though the car is rounded I'll try to lay the UV's as straight as possible so I can have straight lines running along the curved shapes and minimize the jagged pixels along rounder corners. It does have some disadvantages, but overall I like working this way.

Little car Model

Little Round Car

First real post of this blog, it's a little round car for a little round planet.

It's not very highly detailed, but I tried to get the shapes in there with minimal geometry. I will start UVing and texturing as a next step.