A SIMPLE GUIDE FOR EFFICIENT TEXTURING


Actually it is possible to make units that have 500 polygons and run fluently in low-end machine (for today standard, i;e Athlon 600 with 128 meg RAM). An exanple is this Sovremenny I make for WD naval which consists of 583 polygons.

U just have to make it efficient with 2 following principle :
1. Combines texture with TA flat color.
textures suck much, much more memory resources than flat color, so if the model is very complex then use color interspersed with texture.

The model of sovremenny deck and lower hull is almost all use flat color. It still looks good in game if U make it properly, like this


2. Avoid ovestretched maps
TA use a lot of PC resources to make interpolation of overstretched maps, in other way TA hates polygon that both too small and too long/to narrow (depended on your POV ;) ) As example is this following selected poly, everytime I put a texture there it will cause game slowdown when the several this unit build, so for polygon like this try tu use flat color only.

CORPSE

If U notice TA usually got slowdown near end of game or after several hours playing, this usually because too much polygon on corpses. I have my lazy days to and on most units I simply retexture the units 3DO model. Avoid doing this when make very comples model. Try to make special model of corpses. A good way to do this is to make monoblock model (unify all the part) and remove varoious unnecessary faces. As example, again, in this Sovremenny I even remove 80% of polygons including the lower part of hull but it even looks better as corpses

Kanrinin : R.Setiawan (aka Maestro himself)

email : maestro_setiawan@lycos.com