Adding Level of Detail to a model.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Recently I discovered that adding detail to model is very easy to do in GSL. I made a one piece pilot rifle extruded from a simple nurbs curve object, extruded it with the sweep tool, began adding more detail by right clicking the rifle object to open the edit controls, selected the add edges tool, and began adding new edges to areas like the stock, main body, and barrel. I made a simple carrying handle by using the object subtraction tool as well. I can see from the IDF rifle in order to make it usable though will require more then one peice and some animation too.

Has anyone successfully made a rifle model that might give me some feedback on making my own version? On a difficulty scale of 1 to 5 what is the level of dificulty for the average modeler to make?

   

[mrtwosheds]

I made a sniper "pistol" for my dalek race, Its a fairly simple thing, extruded box and cylinders, with a flat sniper screen that is animated. most of the detail is in the texture, the tricky part is making the external and cockpit view models look right, the orientation of the models is different for some reason, so one needs to be rotated 90 degrees differently from the other.
Positioning can also seem difficult, until you figure out that giving the main body of the cockpit model an animation and then adjusting its start/end values to position the cockpit view is much simpler than endlessly mucking about with the model itself.
Sniper scopes really do need animating, otherwise it looks bad when it just stops working and obscures your view when you switch to combat mode.
The flat screen on my "pistol" simply lies flat on top of the gun, flips upright and moves towards you a bit, simple but it looks ok.

And don't even think about putting arms on it! I heard a rumour that one of the main causes of the ongoing scion/Isdf conflict is the unauthorised grafting of human arms onto any creature who picks up one of their rocket launchers! 

[TheJamsh]

theres a useful little feature in Xnview.exe that can 'add detail' to image files.

i used it on a couple and it really does look good on tiny models like those. give it a whirl maybe! the texture should be of an OK grade to begin with though, and its no match for photoshop or anything of course...

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

From what I've seen about adding detail to models the model should not not have excessive polygons. I read somewhere that the more polyies a model has the harder the game engine needs to work to smoothly render models in the game. I remember a while back when Lizard revealed that some really nice models can be produced with 650 faces.

The secret seems to be with adding detail with more detailed texture maps. One technique that I'm currently working on involves making more high poly models to get more detailed screen captures, paste them into my paint program and then enhance them with the paint program itself. The screen grabs include stuff like the scene lighting to make the rendered image look a hell of a lot nicer then simply working with the default UV map generated by the UV map editor. Once the image is enhanced then I can import it into GSL via the material editor, drag and drop the texture into the editor, apply it on my model, and then reposition it using the UV editor to rescale and fine tune the texture alignment.

In my opinion producing better texture images is the real key to making better looking models, and not just adding a lot of polygons.

[OvermindDL1]

Correct.  Just making the model, basically anyone can do, and you cannot call yourself a modeler by just making models.  The real modeler can make a texture that can make a 200 poly model look like it has 20000; no, not joking about those numbers.  In most modern games they will generally make a high poly model fire, around 500k or what-not, then make a few low poly model, between 500 to 4k, gepending on the model, then they make a normal map between the low and high version that makes it look like it gets that detail back, so they have it a little bit easier in modern games.
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[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Unfortunately, not many of us can paint truly awesome looking textures, so one suggestion shared with me by Avatar was to use screen grabs from the models in the modeler workspace after getting the lighting positioned right, and then pasting the grabs in just about any paint program.

The view that seems to be the most useful are the top, bottom, and side views. Incredibly detailed 3d models can also be used to get the screen grabs, and then applied to much more simplified 3d models for the game.

Considering I can't save models of more then 650 faces I usually created a high poly version of my model for getting the detailed screen grabs and applying them to a second but relatively low poly final model version. Shown below is a simple example of this.

[VSMIT]

@BNG: you know that Caligari has released trueSpace 7.6, right?  For free?