Yes they do have to be specific names e.g.

Weapon-0
Weapon-1
Weapon-2 (no point going higher than 3 weapons engine ignores them)
Hanger
Exhaust
Ability-0
Flair-Flair_
Center
Aura

Be careful about the facing/tangent of the dummy points in some cases like weapons and exhaust the facing matters.

I do not know the answer regarding soft vertices, my guess would be no but others may know more.

Yes, XSI has a setting for Hard vertice and points. It also has an adjustment so youc an set it to what ever strength you want.

What's to support? The hard settings is just for the molding of the polymesh. When you merge it removes all this when it creates the new polymesh with out the polymesh hull. Essentially removing all that info.

You start a model to use this by creating a polymesh. I usually use a cube.
Then I hit the "+" on the key pad to get a higher subdivision. Then iturn on Polymesh Hulls. (Remember if you want it to mirror what you do on the other side you can select have the cube using polygon tool then delete. Then select the half of the object left and then clone it. Then set you "S" X-Axis to -1 and it will mirror it. Then merge and delete the original object you merged)

Then you model your ship or whatever. Setting your hard vertices or points and adjusting them. Then when you are all finished you select all elements you created for your model (the ship itself, any guns you modeled seperately, engines ect ect)
Then MERGE them, then click to transfer any uv, textures ect ect (incase you, like I do texture and add lights on the fly). This creates a new model without the polymesh hull, adjust the subdivision level to your liking).

At this point, I seperate them select the newly created model, name it whatever (carrier, Battleship, fighter, Gun platform...) and export it as an XSI model. Then because I want to keep the original model I delete the one I just created and open a new scene saving the original. I keep the original incase I need to do something on it at a later date. Then import the XSI model I just exported. This way I can touch it up or work with adding textures whatever I need to do.

This model is clean and has no extra info. All the hard vertex and points do it tell the polymesh you want it pulled in this direction more. At this point I use the triangulate tool and then the reduce polygon tool to get the model reduced down to an acceptable polygon count. The 7 Deadly Sins Carrier I did for the Atlantians is about 14k poly right now. One thing you must remember is that when you convert it to MESH it will reduce the poly count. In XSI my carrier is 38k when I convert the XSI it is about 14k.

Another thing to note is if you reduce the model to low you will lose some edges. You have to go and manually fix these. The reduce poly tool will also work on selected areas of polys. There's a ton of tricks to the trade.

Now if I could just figure out how to do the textures I would be good to go. Anyone care to explain this?

14k polies is far far to many for a model siath1970 and trying to UV texture it would be a pain in the ass getting rid of all deformities caused by such a high poly count.

infact 14k polies is higher then the human models in crysis.

and poly reduction tools SUCK ass they should NEVER be used, infact I have yet to EVER encounter a situation where they work properly.. if you think they do create a sphere with 30 lat and vert lines, then run poly reduction on it to 50%

if poly reduction was any good it should reduce it to 15 lat and vert lines and keep it perfectly shaped.

It doesnt it deforms what was a perfect sphere with uneven and odd faces.

from looking at the models in game with no textures I would estimate the capital ships are around 750-2k polies. With the Majority of polies actually on the weapon mounts such rather then the model as a whole.

you also have to remember polies are counted in two ways, TRIS and Quads and if the game engine uses quads then something made in TRIS will seem reduced.. the real thing to watch is actually the NUMBER of verts.

TFL BigBANGtheory, please see my last post for a pair of questions.

DrathKar and saith1970, what's important to remember is where and how the model is being used. If you have a ship with 14k poly's then you probably don't want to have a lot of them on the screen at the same time unless you're aiming for higher system requirements. Likewise, if you have a smaller 2k poly's ship you can have a ton of them, but there's a point at which you don't want there to be too many due to the associated overhead and rendering demands of each individual unit. It all essentially boils down to balance and the system specifications you're targeting.

BTW, I agree about the poly reduction tools. Optimizing a mesh can be as easy as merging vertices that are close to each other or eliminating edges where they're not required. It's time consuming, yes, but it's a necessary part of optimization.

Personally, my target is 4k to 6k poly's per ship and less for smaller ships. I'm not ready to announce what I'm doing yet, but I've got a star destroyer at 5500 poly's I think I can drop down a bit more to 5000 WWW Link like I did for a federation ship WWW Link.

Hrm ok, I didn't realize that about the tools. I guess I will go back and do it by hand thanks for the help.

Should I still convert to triangles? I mean I know the original models use triangles how important is that?

Sins require quads and tris... so as long as you don't have polys with more than four sides you're set. Although some of my early versions of models actually had plenty of 5+ sided polygons and the engine had no problem rendering them. But I imagine its necessary for optimisation reasons.

The most expedient way to remove 5+ sided polys in XSI, as far as I know, is to select your model, go to polygon selection, pick n-gon subfilter, press ctrl-A and then simply subdivide them using triangles method. This creates allmost no deformation, just remember to do it before any symmetrizing, duplicating etc. because if you do it after the results may vary on corresponding polygons and that will create extra work later when you get to UV mapping.

I never said the engine couldnt run a 14k ship I said they shouldnt be that many... they really dont need to be you cant zoom in close enough for anything good texturework cant do better.

on a dreadnaught(planet kill like starwars moonbase thing) type size... it might work..

this ship is only around 12k polies and its been smoothed twice ontop of extruded plate detail for use as a base polybump for a low version.

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e243/Phoynix/?action=view¤t=cruiser.png

ok, i'm not sure if this was mentioned, but where do i have to go to add Weapon/Exhaust/Ability point with 3DS Max 2012?