High-Poly Super Teleport Pad

[PWNZOR]

 

Download here (Manual) / Cafeteria Patch

 

Just paste the contents of the folder to Buildings/BIGTeleport (overwriting the files) and you should be good to go.

 

Replaces the models for the Super Teleport. Because one of the pipes was misaligned, the animations contain a slight tweak to the coordinates to fix it.

 

Additionally, the Teleport.lwo edited is from World/Shared, but the game should load the one from Buildings/BIGTeleport first.

 

[PWNZOR]

Could this be moved to Custom Objects?

 

Edit:  Thanks!

[Cyrem]

Made a patch for this(added to post), installed and works brilliantly. Thanks @PWNZOR

 

[PWNZOR]

@Slimy Slug has informed me that this model does cause a small slowdown when used with other mods. I didn't notice anything because this was the only model I was using when I tested.

I thought that it had a good balance between aesthetics and performance, but apparently I misjudged it. The slowdown is largely due to the pipe geometry, which I will try to replace with a significantly lower-poly version when I have some free time on my hands. Until then, use at your own risk.

[Lair]

It's good, but possibly a little too high-poly for this game. Aside from the tubes, I'd get rid of the fingernail-grippable grooves under tiles and the rounding on the edges of some bricks. Maybe okay as a first-person high-poly model, I guess, but definitely not necessary or even really visible from top view.

[PWNZOR]

1 hour ago, Jessietail said:

It's good, but possibly a little too high-poly for this game. Aside from the tubes, I'd get rid of the fingernail-grippable grooves under tiles and the rounding on the edges of some bricks. Maybe okay as a first-person high-poly model, I guess, but definitely not necessary or even really visible from top view.

 

I still haven't had time to sit down and redo the pipes, but I'm not sure what you mean with the other points.

You want to get rid of the grille pieces altogether?

Also none of the edges have rounding, so I'm not sure what you mean by removing that part. Is there a specific area you can point out?

[Lair]

I was talking about the stuff like this. The ones like on the bottoms of front faces of slopes and 1x1 cylinders that are at least half a plate high are fine, but the grooves on blocky plates like this you could easily cut for this game's performance purposes. And the rounding is the slight sloping at the top of some bricks like i pointed out on two there. If it could run on modern graphics stuff better maybe not but this game is a mess. I'm guessing this was exported from some other brick database or something? 

[PWNZOR]

Ah right, sorry, I forgot I made my bricks for the tiles that way. I made a big collection of these bricks for a different purpose a while back, where I made most of these details including internal geometry (almost all of this has been culled for the game).

 

This particular model doesn't really benefit aesthetically from the bevels on the top, except for the striping in the back (which I actually took some liberty in making, since there was no basis on what bricks were used there). The bottom insets are more noticeable, but you probably wouldn't notice it normally when viewing it from top-down while playing.

 

I would maintain that their contribution to the total polygon count is not the main thing to worry about, though - the bevels contribute 4 extra quads for each tile piece, and the bottom insets are 8 more quads. For this model, that's 11 pieces (+2 for the grille insets), adding 148 quads. I'd worry about reducing the # of sides for the studs or something else before worrying about the bevels and insets. If it's really a concern though, I can change it for the next revision when I fix the pipes. I'd like to at least keep the bevels on the stripes in the back, since it makes it more noticeable that they're actually LEGO pieces.

 

 

All of the models I've made were made from scratch, apart from the RR helmets I made forever ago.

Even the pipes were made from scratch, though I did export a model from LDD with the pipes bent correctly as reference when making these. But there's no polygon in any of these models (again, barring the helmets) that were not created by me.

[Lair]

18 minutes ago, PWNZOR said:

All of the models I've made were made from scratch, apart from the RR helmets I made forever ago.

Even the pipes were made from scratch, though I did export a model from LDD with the pipes bent correctly as reference when making these. But there's no polygon in any of these models (again, barring the helmets) that were not created by me.

sorry if this is going off topic, but what program/tools within that program did you use to make those, particularly the pipes and other curved pieces like those rails?

 

I guess the bevels aren't a big deal, I just wasn't sure how visible in-game they'd be.

[PWNZOR]

12 minutes ago, Jessietail said:

sorry if this is going off topic, but what program/tools within that program did you use to make those, particularly the pipes and other curved pieces like those rails?

 

Everything is in Lightwave! I bought it a while ago through an educational store. I grew to really like the program, since it's really easy to move individual points/polygons/whatever without dealing with any sort of transformation layering like 3DS Max or anything like that. It's got a lot of fancy tools too, mostly for things I never touch but I have made use of a decent number of them.

 

 

The rails I made a while ago, they were made from splicing together cylinders and sections of toroids that Lightwave can generate. After that it was just some boolean operations to merge that with the studs on top. I do a lot of manual editing of individual points and polygons to make everything as clean as possible, leaving everything in terms of triangles and quads.

 

The pipes I made by aligning a spline curve along the path of the exported pipe from LDD. I used a Rail Extrude tool to create ~50 sections of pipe. I then did some selection magic and used Lightwave's Extender Plus and Multishift tools to create the corrugated effect on each section. I again tried to match LDD's pipes as much as possible, while still reducing it from the obscene number of polygons that the LDD export had.

 

When making a target model like this, I usually create each brick individually, creating all its internal geometry. I have a very particular system of measurements that I use consistently across all my bricks. After I have the bricks, I 'build' the model like it normally is in LEGO. I then break it into whatever chunks the game uses and cull out anything that's hidden. If two same-color bricks are back-to-back, I'll combine the polygons that made up their shared sides (see the side towers' sloped turquoise pieces) and remove the hidden faces. Since LRR's smoothing algorithm is really dumb, I unweld anything that's not a continuous curved surface.

 

Here's a simple before and after comparison:

[lol username]

4 hours ago, PWNZOR said:

Since LRR's smoothing algorithm is really dumb, I unweld anything that's not a continuous curved surface.

That's not LRR's smoothing being dumb, or even any sort of algorithm; that's just generally how 3D models work. Sure, Lightwave has options for setting smoothing angles and such, but all that's doing is choosing what verts to unweld automatically, based on said angle (which apparently isn't actually applied to the saved model geometry for LRR to read; it's just Lightwave unwelding stuff on the fly). Other programs have similar features for automatic welding/unwelding based on angle, but they're usually just there to give you quick mostly-correct results, which you can often then go in and tune up manually, welding and unwelding things as needed.

 

Also, I've said this before, but a quad is just two tris as far as rendering is concerned, so 148 quads = 296 tris. Absolutely nothing by today's standards, but LRR isn't the most efficient game from what I've heard, so... eh.

[PWNZOR]

5 hours ago, Terrev said:

That's not LRR's smoothing being dumb, or even any sort of algorithm; that's just generally how 3D models work. Sure, Lightwave has options for setting smoothing angles and such, but all that's doing is choosing what verts to unweld automatically, based on said angle (which apparently isn't actually applied to the saved model geometry for LRR to read; it's just Lightwave unwelding stuff on the fly). Other programs have similar features for automatic welding/unwelding based on angle, but they're usually just there to give you quick mostly-correct results, which you can often then go in and tune up manually, welding and unwelding things as needed.

 

Also, I've said this before, but a quad is just two tris as far as rendering is concerned, so 148 quads = 296 tris. Absolutely nothing by today's standards, but LRR isn't the most efficient game from what I've heard, so... eh.

 

I would still expect any decent smoothing algorithm to not apply smoothing to 90 degree angles or greater. The exact angle that you can specify in Lightwave, sure I can understand not supporting that. But with LRR, you get stuff like this:

 

 

And yes, you've said the tris/quads thing many times. My point in saying that was it's nowhere near the most significant contributor to the overall polygon count for this model.

[lol username]

6 hours ago, PWNZOR said:

I would still expect any decent smoothing algorithm to not apply smoothing to 90 degree angles or greater. The exact angle that you can specify in Lightwave, sure I can understand not supporting that. But with LRR, you get stuff like this:

There, uh, generally aren't "smoothing algorithms", and there isn't anything going on with LRR specifically. That's just how 3D models work. You can see the exact same thing (and often times the reverse) happening in pretty much any other game or engine, when the artists don't make their models properly (or they've deemed it to look alright). You've seen this pic before but linking again for anyone else reading this - it's up to the artist to unweld (split/duplicate) verts to get the proper shading, often using the "split by angle" method as a starting point (and these days, sometimes people tweak the vertex normals too as explained in that pic, though that wasn't widely used back in the days of LRR, or even today for that matter).

 

Oh, and no, I wouldn't expect any decent "smoothing algorithm" to unweld verts with 90 degree angles; that's often used on low poly square studs (and other low detail rounded surfaces) to give an appearance of roundness with very few polygons. So it's not a thing an algorithm could do correctly; it depends entirely on what the artist wants the model to look like. It's just as much part of the modeling process as texture mapping/setting up materials/anything else, and the game will simply render what you give it.

 

(Also, while grabbing pics of that LI1 beach building, I noticed it has a welding goof that goes mostly unnoticed thanks to the default direction of the light in-game and black color, but is obvious if you change the lighting with debug mode. Weeee!)

[PWNZOR]

I should clarify my wording - I don't do much with 3D rendering, so apart from what I do here for LRR I don't have experience with how different software handles rendering. I only have basic knowledge and what Lightwave provides me. So when LRR throws some 90 degree shading at me, I find that really dumb. All of the examples you showed me of 90 degree shading looks bad, opposite corners on the quads are separated by a line of dark shading. I understand why it's doing it, but it just doesn't look good. And since I haven't really observed closely instance where 90 degree welding occurs, it's just something I would expect things to be smarter about. You've provided clear demonstrations that it often isn't the case.

 

Also I'm assuming that 'reverse' image is from LEGO Worlds? Looks like only the 6x6 rounded corner plate and the 6x6 rounded corner brick had welded stud edges. The conical portion of the 1x1 cone bricks are also welded, but none of the other round surfaces are welded. I wonder what the reason for that is.

[lol username]

3 hours ago, PWNZOR said:

Also I'm assuming that 'reverse' image is from LEGO Worlds? Looks like only the 6x6 rounded corner plate and the 6x6 rounded corner brick had welded stud edges. The conical portion of the 1x1 cone bricks are also welded, but none of the other round surfaces are welded. I wonder what the reason for that is.

It's an early LEGO Universe model, they hadn't solidified their 3D LEGO workflow or techniques yet. There's also a knight's helmet and a few other things in LI2 I was thinking of posting but I figured I had enough examples, haha.