Subject:
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Re: Seemingly insane poly counts in official games - how?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad
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Date:
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Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:56:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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1910 times
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In lugnet.cad, Stefan Garcia wrote:
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In this trivial example the reduced model ends up equivilent to a single
tall 2x4 brick! We’ve achieved a 50% reduction. The more bricks you stack up
the more you save.
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Well, you’re partially right, but the amount of polys per model would still
be ridicilous (sp?) due to the tubes and studs still existent on the top and
bottom.
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Hmm, How many poly’s in that model? and what game is it a mod for? Balancing
poly budgets in games is a non-trivial problem, how you do it is very dependant
on the game, how many instances of a model is the game expected to render at
once? how small on the screen are the models going to be?
Aha, a quick search answered my own question, it’s for homeworld. A game where
there are potentially hundreds of ships and other models on screen and all of
them are tiny. No wonder the poly budget is so tight. In fact 99% of the time
having studs would be a waste of time as they’d be too small to see. In an
ideal world your game engine would support multiple levels of detail so that
when the ship is up close to the camera it could use a high poly model with
studs, smooth cylinders and all the other gubbins, but still use low detail
models when they are far away and the detail couldn’t be seen anyway.
Lego Starwars in comparison has probably no more than a dozen or so Lego models
on screen at any one time (plus the environment) (from what I’ve seen of the
demo) So of course they can afford to devote far more polys to each model.
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In theory it should be possible (although not necessarily easy) to do some
of this automatically for Ldraw models.
In practice however the hairiness of the Ldraw dataset (BFC issues and the
fact that parts weren’t authored with this sort of brutality in mind) make
it much more difficult than it should be.
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That is an interesting idea. For BrickSpace, the game mod I’m making, it
crossed my mind briefly that people might be able to use a special parts
library to create easily importable models for the game. Sort of along the
same lines as what you’re saying, though to a more refined degree. I
wouldn’t know how to implement it, and I’m not sure it would even be worth
it, considering the kinds of optimisations I had to make on my custom models.
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There are automated strategies for creating lower LOD’s from a high detail mesh,
but actual useful implementations tend to be limited to very high end modelling
packages. Plus the results are unlikely to be as ideal as a hand built model.
Cheers
Tim
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Seemingly insane poly counts in official games - how?
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| (...) Actually, Homeworld does exactly that. I've yet to finish texturing the first batch of 28 or 30 ships, afterwards I'll LOD em. This is my first mod, so I was unsure what the poly count guidelines should be, since I want to keep the amount of (...) (19 years ago, 22-Jun-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Seemingly insane poly counts in official games - how?
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| (...) Well, you're partially right, but the amount of polys per model would still be ridicilous (sp?) due to the tubes and studs still existent on the top and bottom. (URL) (...) That is an interesting idea. For BrickSpace, the game mod I'm making, (...) (19 years ago, 22-Jun-05, to lugnet.cad, FTX)
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