What I Did Today

[David E. Gervais]

AT, Around here there are Universities that offer a 'professional' course on 3DS Max, It is a intensive 'night-time' course that runs 20 weeks with two classes a week. Each class is about 3 hours. The course costs $12,000. I have a few friends that took the course and in the end they said that the teacher only knew the basics but encouraged the students to explore the 'other' aspects of the program. omg, my friend felt so ripped off, not only that, there wire 17 students in the same class.. and only one teacher. And to make things worse, the teacher was virtually unreachable out of class hours and during the class every student was trying to squeeze as much 1-on-1 time with the teacher as they could. ( I did a quick count, $204,000 taken in student fees for the course and the total number of hours the teacher worked with the students was/is 120. That works out to $1700/Hour that the teacher\course organizers made/make.) I'll say it again.. o..m..g.. what a ripoff. Oh and you want to know the killer fact? Only 3 of the 17 students actually went on to get jobs that use 3DS Max.

Anyway, there are many less expensive tools out there, and most if not all are easier to learn.

BTW the idea of sharing/posting a few of your models (with the higher poly counts) is a good one. It would give people that are interested some examples to play with and try to reduce the poly count.

Note, the people at http://www.thegamecreators.com/
have some 3D Modelers and a poly crunching program that looks pretty good. It might be worth thrying their demo's

That's all I have to say for now, Cheers!

[Ed Kolis]

Supposedly the DirectX SDK includes functions to simplify a mesh in 5 lines of C# code:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...plifyamesh.asp

I could probably whip up a quick program to simplify your DoGA models for you... the only problem would be that the REASON that DoGA's models are so triangle-intensive is that they have many useless triangles, i.e. triangles in one Lego part that are inside another Lego part. I doubt DirectX can take care of those automatically, but it can at least reduce the polygon count of your models... at a significant loss in quality, of course...

What you REALLY need is a modeller with CSG - that's Constructive Solid Geometry - on triangle meshes. That will take care of getting rid of those useless interior trangles.
How about Silo? It's not free like Wings (it's $109, which is still pretty cheap for what you get), but it has a similar interface to Wings, and it supports CSG as well as a couple other handy features which Wings lacks. Think of it as Wings on steroids There's also a free Version, but that limits you to 100 polygons, which doesn't even cover the default sphere, so that's probably out of the question. You can check out a 17-day demo at www.nevercenter.com... hmm, I think I just might bring up Silo if anyone still needs Christmas gift ideas for me

The only real complaint I have about Silo is the lack of options for texture mapping, but there are dedicated programs like LithUnwrap which can take care of that