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hammering3d
09-28-2007, 09:15 AM
Hi everyone,

I need some help and advices. (Btw I am using 3ds Max)
I have to make a low-poly scene for a game and I never modeled for games, and are some things that I am required to do that I don't understand or I not sure if I understand them right, pls anyone can give me an advice ?

I need the textures to be in this format:
targa format, indexed, maximum resolution 128x128. The color depth of the majority of the textures must be 16 colors and only for special cases I can use 256 colors.

What I don't quite understood in the above is what is exactly indexed ? I saw in photoshop that U can chose many modes in the image and one of that is index, but how I exactly chose 16 colors ? or 256 colors and how I can see that I actually have just 16 colors ?

Can somebody pls show me some photosop seting to start a texture in the above format ?.

Other question that I have is, if i have this seatings this mean that all the textures must be hand draw and I can't use real images as textures ?

And the BIG thing that I don't know what they are talking about is: the shadow and the highlights will be generated using only vertex color (no default lighting or other light sources must exist in the scene). Does anyone know how to do this ? or do you have a link to a good tutorial about vertex color lighting ?

Thank U very much in advance http://forums.3dtotal.com/images/smilies/smile.gif and I hope I chose the right section of the forum for posting this.
hammering3d
09-28-2007, 09:24 AM
And even this si not the part of the forum for asking this cause is not texturing but because is related to te question above for low poly thing I will ask in here.

What are the rules for low poly modeling for games, how many sides a poly can have ? I know 4 sides are ideal and 3 are ok but not so good, but they can have more than 4 sides ? And is ok to have geometry stick on top of other geometry ? Like an example, if I have a building is ok to model a balcony and stick it on the building face and attach the balcony mesh with the building mesh ? even if under the balcony mesh it will be a part of the building face. ?

thank U
aten
09-28-2007, 09:53 PM
Firstly, it's pretty old school to be doing 16 colour textures in this day and age, where games can use 32bit 2048 textures!

Back in the day I would use Dpaint to do 16 colour textures as you could choose your palette in that prog. Photoshop does let you convert images to 16 colour, but to be honest it's rubbish for working in a palette, although it will let you crunch an image down to 16 colours if you so desire. There's a program available called Promotion which is like a modern day version of dpaint and is much better for working in a palette.

From what you're saying here I'm not sure what your target platform is (must be DS?) but I'm really not convinced photoshop is geared up for that sort of stuff, it will convert images to 16 colours but it's really hard to work in a set palette in that app.
hammering3d
09-28-2007, 11:27 PM
Firstly, it's pretty old school to be doing 16 colour textures in this day and age, where games can use 32bit 2048 textures!

Back in the day I would use Dpaint to do 16 colour textures as you could choose your palette in that prog. Photoshop does let you convert images to 16 colour, but to be honest it's rubbish for working in a palette, although it will let you crunch an image down to 16 colours if you so desire. There's a program available called Promotion which is like a modern day version of dpaint and is much better for working in a palette.

From what you're saying here I'm not sure what your target platform is (must be DS?) but I'm really not convinced photoshop is geared up for that sort of stuff, it will convert images to 16 colours but it's really hard to work in a set palette in that app.

Thank U for the information, and i am sorry I forgot to mention that the game will be for mobile phones, so that why 128X128 maps and 16 colors.

no I enconter other problem :( I have to export the mesh from 3ds max in .obj format and I need to have one single mesh and multy material id in the mesh and I have a problem when I export the mesh :(.

when I try to export it to .obj file the material id are lost they become 1 for all polygons and the smoothing groups are losts. http://forums.3dtotal.com/images/smilies/cry.gif

:(
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