how high poly should suspension be? like this spring for example. 520 faces. View attachment 1521 View attachment 1522
I guess it depends on how much the spring is visible in normal playing situation. Sure, spring is quite tough object to get right with very few polys. But being somewhere around 500 it looks pretty good. What kind of car is this?
a stock car... most everything will be hidden most all the time. except for someone who might zoom in free camera.
I wouldn't mind people zooming in to obscure places of the car with free camera. I'd be only concerned of parts that can be seen in normal playing situation, or in a rollover situation which is quite common in stock car racing.
I wouldnt add springs and other stuff that I cannot see in normal situation. Sure its nice to have details but the cars are meant to be driven
It depends on car what are you doing. If it is open wheel and spring are visible then give more polys. I did some tests on my track and I noticed that amount of polys doesn't make big difference for rf2. My track has already about 350k polys. I increased amount of polys twice and I noticed only 5-10% performance lost. So don't worry about that, more important are materials than polys. Besides, good looking suspension is always very appreciated
An alpha textured cylinder with top and bottom poly's deleted is a good optimised method, in nascar you dont get to see a lot of spring most of the time. For open wheeled vehicles I have used 3dsMax's dynamics object 'spring' which is highly adjustable in terms of polycount. To keep the count low I use only three sides, delete the end poly's and make sure all are one smoothing group. Hope this helps
once created it can be animated and/or used as a dynamic object or (in this case) collapsed to editable poly for use as a static model.
