Not really. That's just too much work and there are other techniques for that, for example displacement. Check out this test render I did a while back:

That whole model actually has only about 60 000 polygons so, something on par with your models. None of the small details, like the cogs, the bolts, blast marks etc have been done with geometry, as you can see with the wireframe:

Instead, all that detail was done in ZBrush and the normal maps and displacement maps were applied to a low-poly mesh with a level 1 subdivision applied. Zbrush version has probably more than 30 million polygons when all parts are added up.

Now, games don't support subdivision and displacement because it slows down rendering a lot, but they do support bump-mapping which is like a poor man's version if displacement. And for games, where a lot of things are happening on screen, that's usually good enough.

Of course, if you actually want to make a machinima of sorts with your models, then I understand where you're coming from. BUT, for a game model to look good, you really do want to UV map it and texture it. You also want to set up your tangents right, because otherwise you'll get weird lighting artifacts in Sins.

@Thoumsin, yeah, maybe that trick with the shader would help - personally I've never used it like that. I am still not convinced that Sins engine won't chug down to a crawl when too many polys are on screen. My Volumetric Explosions mod uses a lot of tiny low-poly chunks when ships blow up, which CAN slow down the game if I explode like a whole fleet at once.

And those are only 20-50 polygons each. So I'm thinking, if Softimage slows down CGI rendering with 1 million polygons on screen, chances are IskatuMesk just has a really good computer if he experiences no slowdowns with 20 million polygons on screen in a game (or Sins engine is really awesome). Actually, I have a 64-bit system and ZBrush sometimes runs out of memory if I get near that polygon count, never mind a game. So performance is definitely a big issue with that kind of numbers.

Well, the dev exe always resets my settings and I find that extraordinarily irritating when constantly running the game to check on my updates to particles and such.

As for UV mapping and texturing, I've been working with 3d graphics for 10 years and have never been intelligent enough to understand even the basics of photoshop or the like. As I mentioned previously, zbrush has soundly destroyed me every time I tried it. I can't even figure out how to access smoothing groups in XSI yet.

Particles definitely cause a slowdown, but I think that's more the particles and less the meshes. It only takes a few thousand particles with oscillation to slow me down, meanwhile I can have a ton of those ships onscreen without too much issues. So I have to be a lot more careful with designing my particles than I do my ships. Blending also can cause serious lag in certain circumstances.

I haven't run into an engine that can give me lag when it comes to polygon counts yet, but plenty of engines, sins included, give me major performance troubles from things that shouldn't ever cause performance troubles. Sins, for example, quickly becomes unplayable on large maps if I have mines enabled and the AI builds mines everywhere. Also, the shield meshes, when a lot of ships hit a target at once, stack up to insane levels and cause a tremendous FPS drop. So I disabled shields on every single ship.

One of my performance tests I made when I was auditing Starcraft 2 (terrible engine btw, as bad or worse than sins in my books) was to place around 40-50 120k triangle models with 6 sets of 4kx4k textures. Each set had a normal, emissive, albedo, and specular map. There was no FPS drop. Meanwhile, 50-60 drones pathing around each other causes a huge drop.

The #1 thing I wish I could do in sins is disable "reform fleet", though. The hardcoded AI and reform fleet makes so much more trouble in my work than anything graphics related.

You are right Thoumsin, about rendering (though dynamics don't take that much time to calculate compared to actual rendering, but that's because of raytracing, GI etc.) -  and thread hijacking. Just to add, I did notice that AI (for example when ordered to move a very large number of ships at once, presumably calculating their paths) and particle effects in particular do have a very noticeable impact on gameplay.

As for using procedural textures, I use those too - as templates in ZBrush. Speeds up the process immensely, the trick is to combine several layers of them to create variation. I'll have a making-of video posted to the Invasion thread soon so you can see what I mean.

Oh, don't I know it. Trying to get a perfect formation for a movie shot, only to have it flattened the next moment. I don't know about you, but I find the tactic of manually arranging ships, sending them off in one direction, then immediately pausing and setting up the camera frame most effective.

There is also a "allow camera roll" option in the game if you haven't seen it. Makes for some interesting camera angles and shots.

You have to make trail textures elongated, so they overlap when they're spawned. Sins missiles move too fast to make a blob trail possible, unless you ramp up particle counts but that WILL destroy your framerate.

Just wait until you hear the SFX that goes with them.

ManSh00ter > I'll try that!

Extremely mangled shot pulled out of some test recordings from Vegas.

I'm sure that you aren't talking about my models.

Iskatu doesn't want to release his models.

I'm sure that he will elaborate...

Left - the Hysteria, with some updates.

Right - Symmetry versions. The far right may see use as a low level UD capital.

Hai all, been a while. I bring another finished model from the X-universe done. It's been fully textured and modified a little to what I gave him before but it's finally in the finished stages it's so gratifying to see a model I made in a game

Eh well I didn't skin it, I leant the model to a mod creator and he modified it to specify the race he allocated it for. Which is Boron in the X-universe, current game for it is X3 Terran Conflict. I like what your doing with the ships in your mod

Also I've posted the ship before without skin and I'm sure we've all seen the skinned version of the ship done my ZombieRus in his mod, it's one of the Plague ships

Greetings to all. I am a fan of your mods and models, and inspired by your work решид and myself try himself in modeling. Please, do not judge too strictly. Imagine the first flagship model ships, invented by me race:

it would be amazing if they joined your ori as cap ships

Ah, Conquest Frontier Wars... such a great game. Too bad you can't replicate the Lancer's attack in sins. Though I'm going to try to.