I have some low poly models that need to be textured, rigged and animated. I am working on a mod for Arma 3 and am not too savy on these things. The models are free models from blendswap and I am ensuring all credit is given properly. I have blender but all I have done so far is some things like a guitar and wine glasses and logos.
The models I have are of WWII planes and WWII Anti-Aircraft cannons like the FLAK 18 and FLAK 38.
the other thing that needs doing is setting LODs but im not sure how that gets done.
The first thing you really need to know is how to texture, Texturing is probably going to be the second hardest part of this.
You texture something first by marking the seams, this is sorta hard to explain in text format so I would suggest that you look on YouTube for some tutorials, the videos should explain it rather well. The second thing you need to know is that not everything needs a texture, just a material. so for something like the skin on a low poly model you can just apply a material to it to get the kind of look you want.
well, I guess the only thing I really need someone experienced for is the rigging and animating. I can figure out the texturing part. The rigging and such I could probably figure out but I need it to look right. I will be loading it into Arma 3's Object Builder and creating the config files for it. The annoying thing is that there is a max poly/face count of 30,000.
Is anyone still interested in helping me out? i have some models to provide but need to know in what format you want them. I can do .FBX, .OBJ, .3DS, or sometimes .blend. I even have some .sketch models.
I am also debinarizing Arma 2 Models. But need help making them look sexy.
Here are some of the files I have converted to .blend. I have others that I want to do but I have to figure out how to retopologize them to get them under 30k tris/faces.
got an update? I have a new model that need to be retopo'd. I paid a guy $50 to make the model and rig it at 10k poly count. I need a few LOD's in decreasing poly counts from the stock 10k to 1k or 500.
You won't rig a simple model like this traditionally in your modeling app for Arma 3 (unless you really want to), you'll set up the bones via named selections in objectBuilder and animate them with the model.cfg.
Sounds like you've got a long way to go before getting your stuff into A3 imo, focus on understanding the fundamental things like modeling, uv'ing and texturing. There are plenty of tutorials out there for those things.
well, I have a box in Arma 3 but that is not animated so this is a bit different. I wish there were a tutorial on adding something like this into Arma 3. Something like a stationary weapons platform. The biggest issue is currently retopo'ing the model from 10k poly down in steps. But, I do not have the retopo tools or knowhow to do that.
Doing resolution lods is fairly straightforward, you're just removing geometry and trying not to break anything too badly (so,don't remove edges that are on a UV boundary). If you're searching for "retopology" tutorials you're likely seeing only organic (character art) stuff, which while helpful isn't really specific to your situation. Making lower lods for hardsurface stuff just involves removing geo. But you've got more important things to worry about, like not having a highpoly, UV's, vertex normals (smoothing groups)...
IMO you're trying to walk before you can run, which happens a lot — You say you've got a box imported into arma but that does you no good if you cannot create the required models, uv's, textures and so on first. You say you paid someone $50 to model that, what was the purpose of that? You need to unwrap it, you need a highpoly model to bake a normal map from (two tasks that themselves take a fair amount of time to learn), unless you're happy with your model looking very dodgy, you need to texture it, all before even worrying about resolution lods. Get something completed, get that in-game, configure it properly, then worry about resolution lods.
I wanted it to be 10k poly count and I was going to take a high resolution texture map for the AA cannon and use that for the material. That way, it would be relatively low poly and still have a good looking texture that makes it look detailed. I was going to take one of the free models that is in the 100k poly count and use that for the texture.
I have done Blender models before but never added them to a game. Except for the box which has no geometry so you pretty much just walk through it.
Most of my modeling has been using Cycles. I am considering getting the Citizen membership with CGCookie but am not sure it is worth it.
