New Model in Progress: The White Star (v4.0 & White Star 90 v1.0)

As you can see, the upper fuselage and the lower nose are tripled, whereas the rest of the ship is made of quads. Click here to find out why.

I am now working on finishing the textures and developing a new lighting rig for the ship.

Why use quads on some areas, and triangles on others?

AMENDED:

I wrote the following text based on experience with some earlier versions of Lightwave. However, for some reason, the Lightwave renderer in v5.6c seems to have developed some rather distressing rendering faults, which cause some surfaces to gernerate rendering errors when any kind of shadows are applied. To avoid this as best I can, WSv4.0 will be released with all of the patched surfaces tripled (converted to triangular polygons). Even this seems to screw-up sometimes, but it's the best I can do. You may be interested to read the following text anyway, as it is (or was) generally good advice for conserving polygons when modeling with Lightwave.

I have explained the reasoning behind this to several people who have emailed me with questions about non-planar polygons.

1. If the surface is going to be double-sided (which the upper-hull and lower-nose both are) then ALL polygons must be tripled. This is becuase the renderer will try to render the underside of the polygons rather than try to smooth across the non-planar sections of the model. If the surface is single-sided, the renderer tries harder* to smooth across the errors, and you rarely see any problems.

2. If the surface is going to be deformed (with bones or a morph) then you really should triple the polygons, to avoid them breaking apart when the shape of the surface changes. However, if the surface is static, the chances are that quads will be sufficient, as you can see from the rest of the White Star. If any particular polygons are especially bad, triple them. Also, if you plan to take the camera **REALLY** close to the model, then tripling may be a good idea.

As you can see from the render above, there are large areas of quads making up this model. This is not something to worry about. Quite a few people have downloaded White Star v3.6, taken it straight into Modeler and found out that it contains large numbers of non-planar polygons. Of course it does! I designed it like that. You have to bear in mind that you are never going to put bones into the structure of the ship and bend it around, and the chances are that it's always going to be whizzing past the camera at a great speed so you won't see any tiny rendering errors.

I have to conceed that the previous version of the White Star had some pretty ugly polygons around the nose gun ports and the hole on the upper fuselage where the bridge stem joins the rest of the ship. However, for this version, I have completely redesigned the spline cage for these areas, and you won't get any rendering errors. If the surfaces did not have to be double-sided (which they do), I would not have tripled them, as the polygon structure is sound enough as it is.

My point is this: When you download this model, there simply is no need to take it into Modeler and triple all the quads. Try doing a few renders and you'll see that this is true. By all means, find out how many of the quads are non-planar, but realise that the renderer is pretty clever and can deal with the minor irregularities.

If you have any questions, fill in the feedback form at the end of the White Star v4.0 preview.

* Of course, this is a simplification of the processes involved...