Mobile Refinery

[Linkus]

Modeling wise, eek! First of all, it seems that you have assigned everything to one smoothing group. This does not ensmooth the model, it simply causes the computer to be unable to define the edges, which causes havoc with shading and looks terrible (see second screenshot). So my first bit of advise (assuming you're using 3DS Max, which I think you are) is to select all your faces, scroll down the right panel until you see the Autosmooth button and click it.

Also, overlapping faces. You have a lot of them. Where two or more parallel faces try to occupy the same area, they're also trying to shade each other which causes the flickering and has been known to cause "shadow bleeding" in other games. Going back over your model to fix this is a nightmare, especially when the problem is as widespread as seen here.
Overlapping Parallel faces is a very amateurish thing to do in modeling and it takes a lot of concentration and practice to get over it. You must be especially careful to avoid doing this. Think carefully about how you're using the polygons you already have before creating more on top. Learn how to use the extrude and chamfer tools and remember to attach adjoining faces together by welding the vertecies on the joining edge. Such split edges can also cause shading issues.

I use Wings3D which has a very retarded renderer attached, hence the strange smoothing. Any model I do with Wings3D tends to look terrible when rendered in it. Fortunately it never turns out that way in actuality and the textures tend to solve that easily.

There are very few overlapping faces on this model and any that are there I'm using as reference points for textures. I rarely ever use seperate objects in modelling and always use extruding etc so it is actually quite hard for me to overlap faces properly:P

Also, autosmoothing simply adds a hell of a lot more faces to models in Wings3D, something I try to avoid.

Thank you for your criticism though.


Doom indeed is working on something alike to this. Unfortunately there hasn't been any sight of it near the forums so I'm guessing it either isn't finished or the idea was scrapped. (No offence intended to Doom btw) Any way it turns out, this model will be finished soon and ready to be put into the game soon after. If Doom has done his model then I'd be very happy to see his in the mod before mine. The better model wins after all:P

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Facilitating the rise of robotics since 0 A.D.