Im making a weapon from scratch for Fallout 3

[TrooperStomperX]

Atm my current poly count is 4030 but I think I need to reduce it, some areas I plan to reduce once I create the bump map and UV map in Cinema4D/BodyPaint however just wondering what is the best poly count for weapons, in particular a sniper rifle in Fallout 3, this also includes all the individual objects which I plan to connect.

 

Also when making a model is it necessary to wield all connected entities together to avoid clipping or would it not be visible or effect the model's real time rendering in the game engine, since I want to keep poly count low but also represent external paraphernalia such as zoom dials, and the stock release leaver.

[Skree000]

ok first and foremost, before you progress on your weapon, if you want FAR LESS headaches, you should immediately grab one of the vanilla fallout rifles and base your design roughly around its proportions. You can go nuts with your own stuff, but the more dissimilar your weapon is to one of the fallout3 weapons, the more broken your reload animation and hand-holding positions you will have. (Unless that doesnt bother you much if your guns reload looks bad/silly and the hands clip through certain places ;))

 

 

@polycount: 4030 polies is fine for a detailed weapon nowadays, although ideally it should probably not be above 7000 triangles (3500polies), HOWEVER, polycounts arent really important anymore since most people have crazy computers. One of the weapons in my mod has over 10 thousand triangles. Its embarassingly poly-heavy, however, i purposely modelled in alot of the detail that was otherwise silly-looking when it was done via texture alone from the original in 2142. 4030 polies is fine, unless you notice your performance gets laggy heh.

 

@welding: you want to separate your gun into seperate meshes depending on which Fallout3 vanilla weapon template you will be aiming to recreate. Have a look at the sniper rifle and see how its parts are broken up, then you will know how to break yours up too.

 

For importing into game you will need:

 

Blender or 3dstudio Max

Nifskope

Niftools plugin for blender or 3dstudioMax

 

Nifskope is a pain in the ass unless you have alot of patience. If you are serious about making a gun work in game, Nifskope will eventually become your friend, but its a tough beast to master. (very nitty gritty technical stuff if you arent accustomed to it.) Not trying to dissuade you from your efforts, making weapons is a great :)

 

Best workflow for weapons is to, in max/blender, import the target Fallout3 vanilla weapon in,a long with your weapon, and scale/rotate yours to match. Then move the trigger/handle to roughly the same area. This is probably the most important, since without the hand gripping the handle, it will look silly. Roughly try to alter your geometry to make your weapon fit that position, as well as where the second/free hand will grip it underneath. This is important to avoid clipping thru the weap, or floating hands, etc.

 

Custom reload animations are not impossible, but there is still a few developments coming soon that should change all that... ;)

[TrooperStomperX]

Thanks for the tips. Appreciate it.

 

 

:thanks:

[TotallyNotToastyFresh]

You basically need a monster computer to run Fallout anyway. It's nothing heavy on the GPU but Bethesda packed so many rocks and crap into the wilderness, and it's very very very tough for the CPU to calculate.