Hoorah - you’re faster with it than me - I’m not anywhere close to done with my attempt (but then I’ve had no time to work on it… so that’s why). You rule.
Given this is from Stefan’s plans I imagine there are a few things “missing”.
You’ve already fixed the 15th plate thing (yay). Does this include the other “fixes”?
I can’t remember them all, but I know the cyclotron light rings had different placement and radius.
There were a few others - anyone care to list them? I can’t remember…
if you feel you’ve spent enough time on this model already (and I can imagine you do) I’d be happy to make the changes needed.
Soo… reskinning a model (as any sensible 3d App like Maya, Softimage, or 3DSMax - my app of choice - will build blank UVs for you) is less work than building it from scratch??
Not sure how you worked that one out. I’ve worked professionally in 3d too (though not any more, thankfully) and skinning is the easy part.
It’s not a matter of just making uv maps. It’s show sketchup makes it’s parts There’s so many wasted (unseen) polys, and a lot of holes where there shouldn’t be any.. and a ton of ngons.
For sketchup, it’s fine and perfect, but for other real world 3d applications, rebuilding it would make the model cleaner, and more poly efficient.
Ahh, gotcha. Well that’s just how it’s built (with all the parts as layers). It would be totally easy to merge all the parts in sketchup and clean them up into a hollow shell - which would give you a much cleaner model.
It’s certainly never going to be low poly either - sketchup produces a LOT of triangles to get smooth curves. I wish they used NURBS internally or something - as once you are at one density it’s rather hard to change.
Tho a decent LoD plugin for high-end software could take care of that quickly.
In this case it seems like you want something that this model is never going to give. However a low poly one is quite a good idea - I’d quite like to have one of those and then mess with it in z-brush to get killer normal maps for rendering.
Right - but when modeling you have to concider the output format. In this case it was a detailed model - high polygon, with a lot of component parts. Totally different to a game or low poly model.
Though creating a low poly model from it should be easy if you have z-brush.
Sketchup is really a conceptual modeling tool and is not built with final rendering solutions in mind. This particular model was built with as much detail as possible for builders and potential builders to be able to explore how all the components fit together and to examine their dimensions etc. The model looks simple and geometric but there’s more to it than that and I did add every detail I could - some of the boxes aren’t square and there are many rounded edges etc. If you just wanted a component for a game I’m sure it contains way too much detail for your purposes.