dim3 Forum

Hello everyone, I'm knew to this forum, and to dim in general, I have a small amount of experience with 3d modeling software, but I need a hand on scripting and animating.

I have a few questions about the Animator, any help would be very appreciated.

1) I am confused by the message the animator gives me asking if I want to use 1, or multiple textures, My model was created in Wings, and he was fully textured their. I have all the textures in png file, I'm just wondering what exactly this message means, and is their a way to combine all of my texture files into one?

2) Also, whenever I try to import the mesh, it tells me models can have a maximum of 8000 triangles, and mine has too many, does anyone know of a way to reduce the amount of triangles in wings? I don't care if it downgrades the quality.

Thank you, anyone who can help

W...w...welcome, and hello W...w...wander.
(Do you mean the movie from John Cleese? Or is it your name? :P )

1) If you have more than one texture file you'll need to select "mutliple textures". I don't exactly understand what you want to ask. :/

2) If the animator tells you that your model has too many triangles you need to reduce them. There is no way in wings 3d to automatically reduce the amount of triangles. You need to do that manually. Beside of that: Your model has more than 8000 triangles? Thats way too much. 3000 triangles are totally enough for a very detailled model.

Welcome to the Dim3 community, Wander.

1) This message pops up, when your model has more than one material assigned in Wings. If you use more than one image file as texture for your model, then select multiple. If you only use one image, select single. That's it.
You can combine them into one, but not in Wings. You will have to bake them in Blender or Cinema 4D or other, similar apps.

2) If your model has more than 8000 triangles, it's probably not a good idea to use it in a game anyway. It will run very, very slow. If you want to reduce the polycount, you will have to remove vertices and polygons in Wings by deleting them. There is no other "simple" way. I wonder what kind of model has 8000 polys though. :/

Hey, thanks guys, sorry I worded my first question wrong. I knew what the message was asking, I meant to ask if there was a way I could combine my textures into one. For the second question, I'm not sure what's going on, my model isn't too detailed at all heres a pic http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/4646/picture1rj1.jpg

Basically the sum of my problems is importing my textures and model into The dim animator.

thanks for your help

Wander Wrote:Hey, thanks guys, sorry I worded my first question wrong. I knew what the message was asking, I meant to ask if there was a way I could combine my textures into one. For the second question, I'm not sure what's going on, my model isn't too detailed at all heres a pic http://img167.imageshack.us/img167/4646/picture1rj1.jpg

Basically the sum of my problems is importing my textures and model into The dim animator.

thanks for your help

You may post a screenshot of the model here, i could tell you whats wrong.

/Edit:
Oh you already postet one. One sec...

/Edit:
Looks like the face has too many polygons. Can you post a screenshot of the wireframe?

The head: http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/3828/picture3ef1.jpg

The Body: http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/6889/picture4vp6.jpg

Wander Wrote:The head: http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/3828/picture3ef1.jpg

The Body: http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/6889/picture4vp6.jpg

Oh my god. :D
You should make a tutorial for lowpoly-modeling. Look under the "tutorials"-section in this forum. You need to learn modeling by extruding from a cube or drawing/connecting points to polygons. Never use other default-shapes like spheres for game-modeling. Too many triangles.

Edit:
You can reduce them. Yes. But it would be faster to create a new model.

Edit:
One example for the leg's cross-section:

Click here if you can't see the picture.

Thanks a lot, I'll work on this.

Optimization is the "El Numero Uno", killer of games around here. If the models don't have serious optimization put into them, they'll be nice looking, but very slow in-game. I'm not expecting you to instantly know how to do it, (took me 2 years!) however I'm just telling you that it's something to remember. It will also make your modeling look better and make it faster, and easier, because you have many less polygons to fool with.

Like Imon said, sub-devision modeling is the way to go for character models these days, there are many tutorials that you can look at (try Google) and they will help you tremendously. Better to make a model that is too low poly, and add more detail as you go, then to make a model that is way over-poly, and have to delete constantly.

Good luck with everything!