This week in the practical Mario came over and had a quick look at my models and happily seemed quite impressed with the work I had produced (especially my Y-Wing) and offered me a few very helpful tips in which to improve my work further from mainly a technical 'nit picky' way.
I was playing with textures on my TIE Fighter when Mario suggested I look at the bump map texture shader. A shader which creates the illusion of detail and depth by tweaking the aspects of the texture map applied to it. I guess this is done by darkening the parts of the texture that are dark to begin with, to create a visual feeling of depth.
The next little tool (and by far my favourite) was a 3rd party plugin for Max called 'Greeble'. This excellent little tool uses a seed system to generate a bunch of module like blocks on the currently selected face/object and is just perfect for creating all the little details along the side of my Venator cruiser as it replicates perfectly what the modules along the side would look like. Also very effective for Death Stars and Star Destroyers might I add!
Finally Mario suggested that I do abit of clean up on some of the finer details of my models such as my Y-Wing, as where I have used the boolean tool to cut out shapes and details, Max has filled in with unnecessary lines and edges. This creates more polys and by removing them, although no change can be seen visually, technically it makes my model much more efficiently designed and lows the poly count, which in turn would make it alot more friendly to use in games, Below you can see a before and after shot of a section of my Y-Wing after I had cleaned the edges. If you can't see the lines, just take note of the poly count in the top right. I did this by simply selecting the lines I wanted to remove, and then clicking the Remove button in the modifier tab! Simples!
Before
After
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