How are you so fast at modeling? I've been working for a few months (on and off) on my Scalengetti, and I'm only now getting the door modeled (and that's pretty easy). I guess the fact that it's my own design and I only have my crappy blueprints to work off of might affect it, but still... You're quite the modeler.
Thank you! But I think a normal mapped grille would look much worse and a few hundret polys more or less shouldn't be a problem.
Even a lot of the cars in GTA 4, GTA 5, and games like LA Noire have the actual mesh pattern for a grill modeled these days, so it shouldn't be an issue, I think. Normal mapping works for many fine details such as seams, indents, etc etc, but for a grille it might just make it feel flat and lifeless.
The finer mesh grilles you see on those models are usually an array of 2d rectangles with a neat texture on top to make it look convincing from a distance, or a plane with some transparency wizardry done to it. I would imagine the poly budget of the cars in a game like GTA to be relatively low when compared to something like Forza or Gran Turismo. Consider the amount of content they have to squeeze into one disc to run on almost decade-old hardware though. Aaand I'm rambling. With that Merc, you could probably get away with normalmapping and texturing the snot out of some simple geometry; the grille looks dense enough for it. What's the polycount on the grille, Mr. iRec42?
I think I used around 600 polys, but I have no access to the file at the moment, because my notebook stopped working yesterday. If the hard drive is damaged I will lose all my progress. So even if I can repair it the next update will come with some delay.
600 polys is like nothing. In my opinion you should keep the grille. It gives the car a more realistic feel. Also, the car isn't as "round" as your 300 SLR for example, so you won't need that many polygons for the bodywork. But that's up to you anyways. You are doing a very great job, so just do what you think it's best.
Like I thought the hard drive is damaged and I have to start a new model. Also I will not have much freetime the next month, so the progress will be very slow. But thanks for all your constructive criticism and support.
Hard drive is damaged so you can't boot. That means you should be able to recover about 80% of your data. Including the model. Just get a drive reader at a local PC shop.
That logic does not stand to reason at all. Boot sector corruption may prevent boot, missing a file or 2 may prevent booting. But just because the drive doesnt boot, doesnt mean the drive is actually intact enough for the filesystem to be read by another device. I sure hope its not the case but its fully possible for that drive to be entirely toast to the tools available to a normal local PC shop. The proper recovery tools which can take a crack at recovering a toasted drive, PC shops don't have, they're expensive, unreliable and slow. Data recovery specialists charge an absolute arm and a leg, you'd think 50 bucks and they'd call it a day, yeahno... Well into the 3 digits sometimes, on large or encrypted drives it can stretch into 4.
I work at a PC shop and typically when a normal users hard drive fails, we can recover almost everything with Windows Explorer. If not we do use a data recovery program which takes only a few hours
I already tried the Windows Explorer, but it didn't help. Also CHKDSK failed to find an error and just crashed. Do you know any useful and free program to recover data?
Both of which rely on the drive being intact with simply a corrupt partition or a few missing files preventing boot. Not a toasted drive, of which I have one right here next to me with a blown SATA slave controller therefore preventing it from even being recognised by any software. Fix that, go on, get 80% of my data from a drive which physically has no way of communicating via SATA anymore.
when you model something you go through a process of making a simple general shape and then slowly refining it and adding "layers" of detail in passes. Not only is this model inaccurate, its unworkable and will never be accurate. - - - Updated - - - yeah, finish it. what you've done there is really nice.
