Building with Polygons (Chosen Few?)

Hello. I'm wondering how one can build a large shape out of polygons. Specifically, how the hull of the USS Defiant in Indigo was made from triangles. Chosen Few, if you read this, could you explain this technique to me? Did you build it in a 3D ap and export the triangles somehow?

Thanks!

-Andy Rote

What you're seeing in Indigo now is the second full size iteration of the Defiant. The first time around, I actually did place every single triangle by hand. I started out by laying out full scale diagrams of the ship (top, bottom, side, front, back) on large planes made from flattened cubes. Then I built sort of a wire-frame out of elongated cubes, to rough out the basic shape. Finally, I laid the trinagles over the frame, and deleted the frame when I was done. The process took about 4 days or so, if I remember correctly. (And at the time, it was the first and only full size Star Trek starship in all of SL, which was a cool title to claim. )

A few months later, I purchased a good size plastic model of the ship, and realized I'd gotten some of the details wrong, so I decided to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, this time taking real measurements, directly from the physical model. Serendipitously, Jeffrey Gomez had just come out with his OBJ importer script*, so I used that instead of doing all the triangles by hand again. Instead of 3 or 4 days this time, it took about one full day, including building the source model in Maya, reconstructing it with the script, section by section, and finally doing cleanup work afterward, to fill in any gaps the script had left open. The triangles you see now are maybe 60-70% the way the script placed them, and 30-40% replaced/readjusted by hand.

Whichever method you decide to use (and I suggest you practice both, a lot), be prepared to work through a lot of headaches and frustration. A build like that takes time, and a really solid handle on SL's various quirks of modeling. There's no way around that.


It's funny you bring this up now. I've actually been thinking quite a bit lately about tearing it down, and redoing it yet again, this time with sculpties instead of all those triangles. The poly count would go up a little, but the prim count would be cut down to just a tiny fraction of what it is now, and the texturing would be sooooooo much easier.

As you can see, I never did finish texturing it the last time. I got the repeats/offsets properly set on about 20% of the triangles in the saucer section, got really bored with it, moved on to other projects, and never got back to it. Like the rest of my place in Indigo, it's sat as an unfinished monument to 4-year old building techniques ever since. It's long overdue for a complete overhaul.


*You can find Jeffrey's OBJ Importer on the scripting forum. Note, it's not really an "importer". It reads vertex and face coordinates from OBJ text, and then recreates a close approximation in-world from triangles. It won't work with arbitrary meshes, at least not well. For good results, you need to create your source model with SL's constraints in mind.

Chosen, you may have an interest in this?

http://npirl.blogspot.com/2008/07/miki-gymnasts-bittersweet-farewell-to.html

"Our own Miki Gymnast, who invariably knocks everyone's socks off with her spontaneous and often mathematically inspired creations, took a previous build and reprogrammed it in under two hours to come up with an exciting and temporal 14,000 prim space, as captured in this moving video by Dizzy Banjo."

Another example of her work, consisting of 11,000 prims all done by mathematical scripting:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/isfullofcrap/2965208286/in/photostream/

Thanks for the links, Dekka. Very cool stuff.

Thanks for your answer, Chosen. :) I'll explore both methods, although... well, can this be done with Maya PLE, or does one need the full version?

Concerning the Defiant, I'd be a little sad to see the current one go because of the way scultpies sometimes remain disappointingly warped and crazy for prolonged periods of time. I also like standing on the hull. I imagine you'd put some invisible prims in to make the hull solid, but they wouldn't follow the contours as well unless they were the existing triangles, right? :)

If PLE can export to OBJ, then you can use it for this. I don't remember off hand whether it can or not. It's been a while since I've looked at it.


I did consider that. But the amount of people who tend to report that phenomenon is quite small. I've never actually seen the effect, myself, and I've got four different computers here. I'm not sure it's worth holding back a better looking model, just because a small percentage of people might see it incorrectly. But I haven't quite decided yet. I'm still up in the air on it.


Right. I would put up a collision mesh, of invisible prims. They wouldn't follow the contours as closely as the existing triangles would, but I think it would probably be close enough that no one would notice.

In any case, I wouldn't delete the old one until the new one was completely done, if at all.