Optimizing the Crates

So for this blog post i will be talking about how i and a class mate Nils Wennergren optimized my crates that i had modeled in class. We were put in groups but because we were only three people in my group then I fixed two of my own crates and Nils fixed one. I optimized my sci-fi crate and my post-apocalyptic crate while Nils optimized my medieval crate.

I will start with the medieval crate that Nils Wennergren did.

So there was not too much to do in this model to optimize it. What Nils did was that I had a half ring that I planned that a lock or something would go to keep the chest shut and locked up. I had made this object as part of the same object as my main chest. Nils detached this object so it was its own object. This brought down the poly count. When they were both connected as the same object I was needed to have more edges so that there would be no engongs.

So Now I will talk about my Post-Apocalyptic crate that I myself optimized. I didn’t run to a lot of trouble when I was optimizing this crate. There were a few engongs but not much more. I must say before hand that i sadly do not have a version of my crate that is before i have fixed it.

(Before pic)

So the first thing I did was to optimize my Cylinders, the cap parts of my cylinders had egnongs that I fixed by connecting them. This was an easy and straightforward thing to do. One thing that I I totally forgot to do was to take away overflowing edges on my cylinder that is building up my rusty water tank. This is something that I could fix now easily but I saw this after I had done all my UVs for the assignment 1 so I might go back later and fix it.

So now finally my Sci-Fi crate. This crate gave me the most trouble, though the trouble was not that hard to fix really it took a lot of time. I sat for around 5-6 hours fixing this problem. It didn’t take me long to figure out the problem I will go into a little more depth later on. One thing that I have learned with this crate is not to trust the program to much. I used a tool called Boolean that will carve out an object using another object witch is rather nice and a fast way to create cool shapes in your mesh. Though when I did it I made holes in my mesh that I did want and thought turned out well but 3D Studio max and Boolean doesn’t really make holes that well so I had to fix the hole so it would be optimized. This is what took so long time.

So what did that I started with a circle hole and fix all the engong, there were plenty! I connected and welded vertexes together to fix all the engongs and after a while I got a hang of it and it went faster for every hole I tried to fix. I know that this crate is not optimized for being in a game and if I would want to make this crate for a game I would start from scratch and do things differently.

Well this is all for this blog, where I went through how I and Nils Wennergren optimized my 3d modeled crates that we have done in class!