Save That Geometry!     By Tom Marlin President, Marlin Studios As graphics artists, we're always trying to create the ultimate scene or animation, using what usually seems like limited hardware for the task. Rather than buying a render farm full of high-speed Alpha machines, there are other alternatives. Here's a simple way to use trueSpace and some good textures to give the illusion of a scene full of highly-detailed geometry (the meshes). The "Gull Harbor" scene you see here has prompted many people to ask, "Wow! How many polygons did you use in that?" (Click on the image to see a larger version.) Actually, there are only 5,800 polys in this scene. If you consider the detail, it could be quite large, maybe in the 100,000-poly range. The trick here is to use low-poly geometry with high-quality textures. SEEING IS BELIEVING . . . As you can see here, the major objects in the scene total 3200 polys. The major visible objects -- the sky and the water -- total 2 polys. The sky is simple. It's just a cloud scene mapped onto a single plane. I prefer using a plane as opposed to a background, because I have more flexibility in moving it around. The water is a little more complicated, but not much. I picked off a tree bark bump map from our "Seamless Textures You Can REALLY Use" CD, and used it to simulate the waves. Another major object in the scene, the rocky island, is just a small irregular mesh resembling a rock. I used a highly detailed rock texture taken from the CD and mapped it onto the mesh. It steals the show from the rest of the scene. KEEP A LIGHT ON . . . The lighthouse and keeper's house are original meshes. The lighthouse is just a simple set of cylinders that are slightly tapered, with a few details added. I used a brick bump map to give it some pizzazz. The house is a mesh I've used several times, but for this scene, I cut down a lot of the detail since you'll never see it up close. However, if I decided to become a gull and do a flyby of the scene, you'd still see some detail in the roof shingles and plaster walls, all done with textures and bump maps. Next Page