Polygon Curvature Modeling

[ExoticLover]

Decided to share a couple of resources to aid into modeling somewhere on a NFS forums.

I know these works better for NURBS modeling, but it can also be used to find bumps where flat-shade and smoothshade doesn't seem to indicate bumps.

Flowcheck.jpg didn't actually come from me, but it's one of those resources that can be found by googling flowcheck. It came from a product designer with his own theory on how to model with polygons with inspiration from Zebra analysis found in Alias, Rhino, Solidworks, CATIA. And yes, I use NURBS as well nowaday or modeling formats based on NURBS like T-Splines and/or SOLIDS.

Smooth lines in your reflection implies that it is uber-smooth. Jaggy lines means that either your model needs more smoothness or there's a bump that can be inferred. This is even helpful for lowpoly modeling as you can find bumps where there isn't supposed to be any, and manipulate normals as you go.

To demonstrate:



This picture shows its practical usage for polygonal modeling and evaluation of modeling. You can see where the model shows bad areas.



This pictures shows what happens if you use mathematical software or use math to generate surfaces. The stripe suggests that it is smooth everywhere. That being said, it can be useful for polygonal modeling only as a guide.

[MADMAN_nfs]

A very interesting topic i think. NURBS have a lot of advantages in modelling, you can display and scale surfaces with infinite detail. Basically they are the 3D equivalent of vector graphics in image processing.

But afaik NURBS are not used in games. At all. Not even modern games make use of them (or similar techniques), also wont in the nearby future. Graphic accelerators (GPU's) and graphic renderers (DirectX, OpenGL...) need polygones (triangles).
So any mods for games, need to consist of polygones in the end. NURBS have to be converted to (polygonal) subdivided surfaces using algorithms or by hand.
The efficiency, however, will be higher when using polygons from scratch. At least thats true if you look at low-poly modelling for older games - but also modern games have their limits, at some point (you cannot say polycount does not matter anymore).

But maybe this conversion process works better than i think? ExoticLover, you already made experience with your ElNino project for example - you already know to what polycount this car would convert ingame?

Most important  point is, having a playable model in a computer game always is a tradeoff between visuals (details) and playability (frames per second).
Of course an object with 100.000 polies will have a smoother surface than modelling it with 5000 polies...

[...]
Smooth lines in your reflection implies that it is uber-smooth. Jaggy lines means that either your model needs more smoothness or there's a bump that can be inferred. This is even helpful for lowpoly modeling as you can find bumps where there isn't supposed to be any, and manipulate normals as you go.
[...]

With the knowledge above, i find your surface comparison a bit pointless (at least the example you showed here). The difference in final polycount is not considered.
It also looks like you just changed the texture file to flowcheck-texture. I think you would need to remap the mesh completely (e.g. from top view?) to really get the info you described? Otherwise the texture is distorted.
Btw is this F50 by Martin Leps, from NFS6 or ...?

Greetings