fences

[creator2003]

whats the best way to make a post four wire fence ?ive made them over and over but there are still to many faces involed and are making my life hell trying to work it out ...should i be doing this with transparent texture and just drawing the poles and wires on ? how do i make tranparent textures, i remember dx3 do i still format them the same with mipmaps etc...
its only a fence but goes around a big part of any airport...
thanx mike

[toprob]

its only a fence

When you think about it, fences are of great social and political import. (I've been listeining to Janis Joplin today.) I can go on and on about fences, and I have been known to... but I won't here.
But remember, you brought the subject up, so I'll blame you if this turns ugly.
I make most of my wire fences using the same technique, so I'll keep this general. The wire part is always a photo-textured, double-sided plane. Like most textures, getting the photo right is half the battle. For my security fence texture I travelled the whole country, and finally found the definitive fence... in the carpark window under the Caketin. This was a good place because it was very dark behind, and saved me a bucket-load of fixing. This is one of the few textures where I just have a single, repeatable texture because I can keep the quality up by repeating a relatively large texture over a small area.
My editing tool allows me to save a TGA image with mask, which I can then load into Imagetool for conversion to DXT1 and retain the mask. DXT3 may seem like a good idea, as it gives a smoother mask, but generally it doesn't work well unless you really need different degrees of transparency.
The mask is normally just a high-contrast copy of the fence texture, that's why I like to start with a black background.
Mipmaps, yes, of course, all my textures always have mipmaps.
My fences always have multiple LODs. The main model has the wire plane, the frame made from cylinders, and another plane sometimes for the barbed-wire barrier on top. A basic fence of posts can be just one cylinder with the textured plane sticking out one side. The post texture can be as realistically textured as you wish.
Depending on how prominent the fence is, the next LOD might just be the cylindrical frame reduce to boxes, and the textured plane, then just the frame, no wire at all. Or I might just jump straight to the frame-only. You'll know when this is working because a well-designed wire mesh will disappear at a certain distance anyway.
The final LOD is normally just empty, which means that you won't see any fences until you have to, and you can fly around and around the airport without losing frames to pesky fences.

[creator2003]

right thank you very much ,,that is just awesome ive been making things the way i know they where built in the real world posts ,3 sides and 1 down then making four long wires the same with textures on them mipmaps and format to dx1 but was getting a bad jar in helos when turning on to them but where good when in sight flying fix wing and landing was no problem ,i built some more and place them at other airport and it did it there too..so i work out what was making this happen
thanks this explains alot
mike