I made a model of a fire hydrant today out of a bunch of primitives; I had considered lofting, but it likely would have taken too long. That's got me thinking. While attaching or booleaning a bunch of primitives might be quick, it can also look clunky. My original idea for making a fire hydrant had been to loft the main body, then loft the bits that stuck out to the sides and attach them. I ended up just using attached primitives, which worked fairly well considering that fire hydrants do have some angular features, but I feel it might have looked smoother as a loft. I did, however, use the extrude tool on some of the primitives to add detail (I remember a time when I would have made terrible use of the boolean tool for the same purpose). What are the benefits and drawbacks of these different techniques? Lofting creates smooth transitions between cross sections–mostly–and eliminates the seams that are common with using multiple primitives or even extruding. Transitioning from cross sections of a different shape, such as a circle and square, can get messy. In addition, because of the smoother curves, lofting generates a lot of polygons, which is generally something to be avoided to keep load times low. Lofting also takes a lot of time, as one needs to have the cross sections laid out beforehand, and it can take a lot of fiddling around to get things right. Overall, it looks nice but can be difficult. The extrude tool is useful for creating details quickly–I used this to add rings around parts of the fire hydrant, some of which were sunken in, others of which stuck out. It does tend to result in a lot of sharp edges, but has a lower poly count and is fairly quick. Sticking a bunch of primitives together is also quick, but tends to end up in a lot of polygons if they are simply attached rather than booleaned (due to the overlap). It doesn't require a lot of forethought like lofting, but is often angular and rough. So, to summarize:
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AuthorI'm moving on to my 4th (and final) year as a Game Art & Design student at Durham School of the Arts. I'd like to call myself an artist, but I'm a programmer at heart. Archives
February 2020
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