Blog Report Week 03

This week on the Wednesday lesson we learned how to optimise our models. We also went through the xView menu.

xView highlights common modelling problems such as overlapping vertices or faces. We used this when we optimised our group members’ models and later one of our own.

This is the before and after of my cartoon chest. The optimisation was made by Mikaela Moberg. Apparently it did not have a lot of problems in it, except for the caps on the cylinders. When she got the model there was four polygons with six vertices but just by cutting each cap in half they were made to be quads; more optimised.

This is my Sci-fi crate. The one that optimised it were Måns Löf. He didn’t find any big mistakes either. Something he noticed and changed was that my crate was slightly unsymmetrical. In the corners of the “cross” you can see that there is a small dark edge that is not the same in every corner.

Måns fixed this by fixing one of the corners and then duplicate it and put everything together again. Unfortunately my group didn’t exchange the models we had fixed, we just sat down and discussed and showed what we had done. So the second picture here is the one that I did myself. I decided that Måns’ approach was a little bit too complicated for me so I merely went over the model and aligned the vertices sticking out with the ones at the corner of the cross.

A problem I found when I looked at my model was that some of the corners hade several vertices on the same place. This must have happened when I extruded and I believe that it is a pretty common thing to happen. I simply collapsed all the vertices to one and removed the problem.

This last one is my medieval chest. As you can see on the first model it had a lot of lines that were completely useless, they weren’t used for anything and they didn’t change the silhouette. When I optimised my model I simply removed them. I also decided that my chest looked neither medieval nor interesting enough so I decided to change the design a bit. I pulled the outer lines of the binding outwards to give it a more interesting shape. I did the same thing on the locks… As you can see I also changed the colour of the model to brown, just to help my fantasy on the way… baby blue doesn’t scream medieval to me.

The biggest problem in my group was that there weren’t any huge difficulties or problems. One thing though that the lesson got me thinking more about is the use of lines where they are not needed. My chest as well as Mikaela’s sci-fi crate bot hade a lot of polygons at entirely flat surfaces. I was the one the optimised hers so then I got to try to minimise the lines that in her case came from some very detailed corners on the same loop as the flat middle. By collapsing vertices I managed to get rid of some of the polygons and lower the poly count of her model.