3D – Week 3 – Optimizing crates

I’ll be posting two 3D-related posts this week, this first one about optimizing our crate-models from last week. As you’ll know if you read last weeks’ post I’ve created three different crate-models, based on three different themes. During this weeks’ workshop the class split into groups of three, and in the groups exchanged models with each other, so that we all got to clean up one model from each member in the group. Two of my three models have been optimized by the other members in my group, and I optimized my third, as well as one from each of the other members.

I’ll be presenting the crates in the same order as last week, and explain what has been done with them and by who.

Sci-fi Crate:

The Sci-fi themed crate was the first of the crates that I created. It was also the most detailed one, and as expected it had some issues. Christoffer Svensson was in charge of this crate, and the first thing he noted was that I had left many vertices when removing loops, and that there were n-gons everywhere. I had ended up with all of the n-gons when trying to create the metal-parts keeping the crate together, as I removed a lot of loops that I thought were unnecessary, but forgot to remove the vertices that belonged to the removed edges.

Christoffer tried to delete the vertices, but just removing them in some places made the edge that they were connected to disappear, so instead he target-welded them with the vertices that were going to stay. He also found a couple of overlapping vertices that he removed, and simplified some shapes on my crate as it seemed to have some polygons that didn’t add anything, or very little, to the overall shape of it. I do think that the light bouces a little in an odd way in some places, though I’m not sure what causes it to do that, as I cannot find any reason for it to bounce like that when I check the edges.

Cartoony Crate:

Ida Lahti was in charge of optimizing my Cartoony crate. Unlike the sci-fi crate, this one was a very simple model. I created the cartoony crate by adding loops and extruding the edges to get the thick edges. I also used loops in order to scale the middle part of the crate to make it bend slightly inwards. As I hadn’t added a lot of details to the crate, there weren’t any vertices in any odd places, and the only thing Ida had to do was to remove some edges that were unnecessary, to lower the polygons and polycount.

Urban Crate:

My Urban crate, being the last one of the crates that I made, didn’t have any edges or vertices to edit at all. As it was the last of the crates I created I’d gotten a better idea of what I was doing when I worked on it. The fact that it was also a very simple shape with little detail made it easier to create it without adding many edges or vertices. It did have a few overlapping faces where the planks on the sides connected with the box, as I had created it as a box, and then created each plank and connected it with the box’s sides. Asking Nataska – our teacher – about it however, I didn’t have to edit those faces, as the faces that were overlapping would never be able to be seen by the player, were it to be added in a game. Had the faces been overlapping on the outside of the model, or any side that would have been visible to a player, I’d have to edit them in order to prevent future problems with clipping textures.

Going through my own crates, as well as the crates made by Christoffer and Ida, I learned things about vertices, edges, faces and more that I didn’t know earlier, and I’ll be keeping that in mind for future models. I should make sure to remove all vertices as well when removing loops or edges, and look out for any overlapping vertices or faces that might appear when editing the models. Working this close up with the models, and having to manually remove and/or connect each small detail gives an insight to how much work 3D-modeling demands, and let us learn things through doing the things rather than just watching or reading about it, which helps a lot.

That’s all for now!

MPh out.