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I've been importing some old weapon models from my commercial game collections into FPSC. (FOR PERSONAL,RECREATIONAL USE AS A LEARNING EXPERIENCE)

I just use Milkshape for both modeling and animating as I just can't see spending much more for my hobby. My problem is it 'seems' as though the poly counts get reduced when I import them into Milkshape. Is this even possible?

Some weapons that I know should have a high poly count like those in Modern Warfare are only showing 800-900 polys in Milkshape. I've tried using subdivisions, and the directX mesh tool to increase the count.

Just a few minutes ago I had to bump the poly count of a COD 4 weapon from 900 to 15,000+ using the directX mesh tool. However, I cannot tell any difference whatsoever in the quality. The weapons, especially from the IWD engine almost look worse than the default weapons that come with FPSC.

What am I doing wrong? What could cause the poly count to drop automatically to 900-1000 when I import?

Ok, well I've sorta figured this out. I've increased the quality of the most recent gun dramatically by creating a new diffuse and specular texture.

I still don't know why the polys are soo low when I throw them in Milkshape though. I've seen them as low as 600 polys. They looked horrible. No depth to the model at all.

I increased the polys to 5k through manual facing combined with auto-mesh. Then retextured the weapon from scratch. Instead of a 512 cube I used 1024. This dramatically increased the sharpness of the weapon in this engine and made everything pop.

For whatever reason it is very hard to make COD 4 weapons look decent in this engine. I'm satisifed with my results though and I`ll follow this same technique for the rest of them. Until I learn something else.

How do you know the original mesh had more polygons to begin with? Many objects can be done with a low amount of polygons while having great quality due to the textures.

5k polygons for a gun? Way too much.

I don't know for sure if the original mesh had more polygons or not. Regardless, when I used the mesh and texture the result was a very blocky, bland, extremely low-lod object.

Their texture files are not that impressive to me. However, COD 4 has much better specular lighting than FPSC. That glare effect combined with the normal helps to make a weapon's texture to look a lot better than it actually does.

Sure 5k for (Weapon + Arms) is abit on the high side but this is just for personal use anyway. I always tend to shoot for high quality on the weapons and a little lower on everything else. The weapon is what you see the most.

But yeah, there is no doubt that a highly skilled modeler could have made the model look fine with a low poly mesh. But, I'm not highly skilled and trust me from what they first looked like to what they look like now they are a Huuuge improvement. As I said, if you just throw the mesh into the modeler and animate it, the results look nearly as bad as the FPSC first generation weapons.

CoD 4 actually supports custom materials, ultimately lighting is what makes a model look realistic, and they can simulate it much better on their models...

UDK weapons are often using materials with around 150 instructions and 4-6K polies.