First of all I did not mean to offend anybody , if that was misunderstood , I'm sorry. BUT when I got started with modeling for this game , I created terribly inefficient meshes and recieved harsh critic and I mean really harsh but after a while instead of just crieing and raging on them about that I actually tought : hey these people have been working with this game for a much longer time than myself so probably they are RIGHT and I am indeed the one who is WRONG here . Thanks to these critics back then I reached my current skill level and i'm really gratefull for that . Fact is that this game's engine is quite old and does not really like rendering many complex models at once.
so now onto the case here :
CaptainCrazy completely missed the purpose of any suggestions and valid points mini and I made, instead claiming that being restricted to fewer vertices on a mesh would
A: make it look not as elegant
B: you wouldn't be able to tell who's lightsaber hilt it was anymore by stripping more detail from it
These claims lead me to start a personal challenge , which I at first did not intend to showcase here but only to see for myself if one could build a mesh with an similiar amount of detail without using 1.2k vertices on the mesh , before all hard edges and UV seams are split , which will duplicate the vertex count along these splits and thereby increase the vertex count by a lot not to say a shitload. Crazys response :
So as you can see I highlighted a few things in there , the first 2 highlighted parts just seemed kinda off to me - judging others as being egotastical and exclaiming THAT in the same sentence ?
the second part is actually where it started to get ridiculous to me WHY should anybody think he could not do any better ? The best content anyone can create for an old game engine like this is something that looks good and at the same time performs as good as possible so you dont want to use more geometry than you actually need - meaning you should scrap everything that could easily be textured on and it will still look convincing enough to be not considered "a box with a few rectangles glued on top"
after this reply by CaptainCrazy Omicron made a valid point - that it is okay to have a higher poly saber hilt for a machinima, some people will want to use it in gameplay situations aswell though, as this is a game after all, so I still think one has to find the right compromise between modeled and textured detail so that both groups of players can appreciate it to the fullest
Following that Crazy started completely ridiculing efficiently built models , and I have to admit I got a good laugh of his tinfoil-box comparison, but somehow that was also the moment I thought - hey you know what ? let me show you my "tinfoil-box" , if you want to see it. That's why I put that post in a spoiler tag, and warned anyone to make sure they really want to see the content as it COULD be offensive to some if you click that spoiler , look at it and ARE offended by the content then it's their own fault - they've been warned and still clicked it. I just wanted to show that theres actually no need to use an "excessive" amount of vertices to make a model look good which is something I learned in the past years . Now let me quote @ here
that's exactly what you wan't to do - push the boundaries without smashing them with a (vertex) heavy club until they break and errors start showing up
The only thing I tried to accomplish was to prove that you can get a smooth shape and maintain the exact same defining silhouette all while keeping the vertex count quite low
I did not do this to boost my ego , I'd have done that in a much more rude & respectless way , I also did not mean to challenge him into any kind of competition or even run him off the forum
I just wanted to teach him a bit of respect for efficient modeling and as that was widely missunderstood I'd like to apologise , right here right now if he's still around by now @@CaptainCrazy , contact me via pm if you wish to talk about what happened here I'd be really grateful for that. To me Videogame art was never about competition - it's allways been my goal to get better , more accurate to the concept and teach my knowdledge to other those in this community who have known me for a while or maybe even since I started modding Jedi academy will probably agree on that.