Hey,
In case you didn't know my favourite ship in SS is the willow o wisp. I've been very disappointed that it hasn't yet appeared ingame. I decided I'd attempt to do something about it and this is what I came up with.

Note: This is the first time I've even tried to use a program like this before in my life, so the image is a little scratchy but I'm sure someone more adept at it can fix up what's wrong with it.

Wow, that's a pretty nice job you've done there.

looks great Camsy!

What's the poly count?

1700 polys

Looks really good, but that's way too many polys for such a small ship. Would be a great model for a bigger ship however

You could probably flatten out the top circly thingies, since most of the detail will come from the texture/glowmap/bumpmap anyways. That could really bring down the polycount by a lot if you think of it that way, just make sure you get the main structure intact and the texture will finish the job.

The underside also has a fair few polys, how many is a reasonable number for the ship, I'll see if I can lower the poly count to what is required.

I think it's somewhere around 400 for light fighters.

Sorry if I sound noobish, what exactly is a poly?
thanks

A poly is one of the shapes that make up the 3-d image iirc.

Poly stands for polygon.

Best practice is to make the entire model out of triangles, but a lot of people (including myself) usually have many 4-sided polys included in the model until you get to the point of optimization (basically the point where you start removing unnecessary polys, edges, vertices etc. to reduce overall poly count while preserving the model structure). The reason modeling with only triangles is best practice is due to the modeler's ability to control smoothing throughout the model.

If you export a model from your modeling program as a .obj and your model has a lot of 4+ sided polygons(some of which aren't perfect rectangles, squares, or rhombus'), the export sequence will convert all of the 4+ sided poly's into triangles anyways, which can cause some weird smoothing issues when you look at the newly exported model.

It's better to control how the polygons will look ahead of time, rather than to try and fix the issue after the fact.

I believe poly just stands for polygon and is any 2d shape, so any face of an object.

This is my redo of the ship. It now has only 677 poly, apparently (being a complete noob to this) I had a huge amount of polys on the underside of the ship. It took me a while but I got rid of most of them. Here's the results:









And here is the .obj files for anyone who wants to try and fix my piece of mess:
Willow o wisp orignal
Willow o wisp reduced poly
The password is: starsonatause

You see how there are a lot of "intersecting" polys? That's a bad thing. They will cause light to scatter in really weird places. If you upload the original .obj (before you started cutting out polys), i'll see about reducing it.

Good practice is to keep a good "flow" throughout the model; you don't want a clusterf*** of polys to intersect at one point, like on the top of your model. Instead, you would want parts of the ship to be sort of modular so that changing one hub doesn't change the entire model's structure completely. Having Vertex Hubs is okay, as long as they are manageable.

Yeah thanks, like I said, this was the first time I've used this program (or any like it) so I was sort of just sticking things together and playing around with functions as I went. I think one of the main problems was I used two sphere shapes in the design, which probs stuffed up the poly count.