Goth Models - Cat (spirit familiar)
07/11/2007 (11:33 am) by Proto
Work in progress:
I've aimed for around 1000 polys. I plan to include 2 levels of detail and 6 animations (sneak, run, jump, sleep, play, stand). I think I'll rig this on the weekend. I've always liked the way cats move, so I'm going to have fun making this one come to life.
I'm loving PLG UV Tools - it's making my UV maps considerably less painful to construct and I've finally figured out what was crashing the plug-in - or rather how to avoid the crash by creating UV maps per model part, rather than attempting the entire mesh at once. As the edges get saved, I can adjust the mesh as needed without worrying about distorting the UV. Sweet!
About the author
Multi-media designer / developer with a passion for games - playing and making. I\\\'m also an amateur composer and musician and am mad about Apple Macs. I acquired a taste for game mods back in the eighties writing sprite machine code on my trusty Commodore 64. I started exploring the Torque Game Engine recently and will start on my first Torque 3D game experiment soon. It\\\'ll be a casual project but I would like to have some new stuff in my portfolio within the next 6 months. I\\\'ve left my day job designing and developing web GUIs for marketers and corporates (I\\\'ve been doing that for [i]10 years now[/i] at various companies), so I\\\'m taking 6 months off to test a few ideas on what I want to do next. I\\\'ve always wanted to try my hand at game graphics and plan to use Torque to test the viability of a career transition. I\\\'m thinking best fit would be a modeller / texture / animator generalist. I got into games after playing with a friend\\\'s BBC computer in the early 80\\\'s (I think it was the BBC computer\\\'s ascii art \\\"owl logo\\\" and the movie \\\"Tron\\\" that first got me hooked on computer graphics). I have NZ / UK dual citizenship and like to travel. I\\\'m currently living in Melbourne, Australia. view profile »
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Quote:
and I've finally figured out what was crashing the plug-in - or rather how to avoid the crash by creating UV maps per model part, rather than attempting the entire mesh at once.
First of all I'll say PLG is the bees knees for UV in Lightwave. For those who don't know, it'll unwrap complex meshes in a configurable manner and automatically jiggle the resulting UV to eliminate image stretching. And it's free - which is pretty hard to beat.
The PLG plugin crashes for me on occasion when it doesn't like the mesh or boundary edges of a particular model. It seems most likely to happen when the "Divide by Surface" option is used. I've not seen the crash as often when making UVs for each surface (by selecting polys in the stats window). The crash seems to happen when edges don't meet or there are a lot of polys, and it seems to happen more often when creating a UV from the entire mesh with the "Divide By Surface" option on. This is a replicable bug for certain meshes only. For other meshes it works fine. It's hard to identify the bug as the logs aren't updated.
I've been working around it by making a selection from a surface or part first, and then using PLG_Edit to create the UV for that surface / selection. This is quite useable and isn't as tricky as it sounds as long as your mesh has surface boundaries where you want to split your UV.
I'm on a Mac OSX 10.4.10 / Dual G5 1.8Ghz / 2.5GB ram using Lightwave 9.0 and PLG 2006/9/29.
Torque Owner Clint Herron