High poly + low poly

Zenka · Post by **Zenka** » 21 Jan 2006, 13:05

Well, I have a high-end PC, and even I disables shadows. I get under 20fps with it in mid game. Without shadows, no matter how may triangels there are on my screen, I never got any lower then 30 fps.

It's a shame people have to disable shadows, it makes the game look so much better. And the reflections on metal really pwn.

AF · Post by AF » 21 Jan 2006, 17:42

muhahahaha you lot are forgetting something. The untis arent the only thigns beign displayed that are composed of triangles. That shot where caydr said there where zero triangles is untrue, the terrain itself contributes, otherwise shadows would work just as fast as non shadows (maybe slightly slower) if there where no untis onscreen which simply isnt true.

smoth · Post by **smoth** » 21 Jan 2006, 19:50

Zenka wrote:Well, I have a high-end PC, and even I disables shadows. I get under 20fps with it in mid game. Without shadows, no matter how may triangels there are on my screen, I never got any lower then 30 fps.

It's a shame people have to disable shadows, it makes the game look so much better. And the reflections on metal really pwn.

what are your specs?

I play with shaddows.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 21 Jan 2006, 20:08

AF wrote:muhahahaha you lot are forgetting something. The untis arent the only thigns beign displayed that are composed of triangles. That shot where caydr said there where zero triangles is untrue, the terrain itself contributes, otherwise shadows would work just as fast as non shadows (maybe slightly slower) if there where no untis onscreen which simply isnt true.

No, didn't forget that. Regardless of this, even with a space map consisting of no terrain whatsoever there is a drop from 300 FPS to 30.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 21 Jan 2006, 22:35

Basically, I think we're all in agreement here, except for those folks who're still working in 3DO, which I can understand... it'll just take 'em awhile to get that making LODs ain't really that painful anyhow, once they migrate away from the OTA engine... heck, even just having a lower-resolution texturemap can free up a lot've bottlenecking, let alone getting rid of small greebles that you can't even see from a mile up.

Ideally, we'd have units with really high polycounts up close, and an FBI tag would call out LOD distances (which could then be interpreted/turned off by Spring's configurator). This would allow for a lot've freedom- models with no LODs wouldn't have the relevant line in the FBI (for things that need to keep their crazy detail levels, like, say, a Star Destroyer... where one might fill a goodly portion of a screen) and things you might want to zoom into close views with... say... flying in a TIE fighter against those pesky Rebel X-Wings... could have multiple LODs.

I'm not going to claim that multiple LODs is necessary for the vast majority of game designs. I wouldn't build LODs for a typical RTS, for example- players are generally using a top-down viewpoint, and they're viewing things from high enough that simply using DDS with mipmaps should help performance... and polycounts don't need to be very high. How high, for example, are the polycounts in games like Dawn of War? I think that the average unit there tops out around 500... maybe 1000 for really complex objects. They keep the number of objects low, and use very simplistic shadow models, too, so that their real-time lighting and other SFX can run very nicely even on midrange machines.

Yes, you CAN make things that look that nice at low polycounts... the spacecraft Caydr used to demonstrate his point, while fitting as a scientific example, is a really terrible model (not aesthetically, mind you- it looks just fine) from a technical standpoint, and could be less than half that polycount very easily and look just as detailed. Most people here are still in the modeling newbie phase, unfortunately, and are confusing high polycounts with "detail", when in fact the skin is most of the detail. It's a bad habit to break, but I'll try to teach what I know as I get past the initial hurdles with S30.

If Zaphod's bumpmap demo shots will eventually apply to S30 (that'd be the blue channel, eh... too bad there won't be transparency, I really wanted that... or will that be the alpha... mmm... alpha trans + reflect + bump + glow .... mmm) then we're really in a situation where the graphics cards are going to be expected to carry most of the load on the rendering end, and we should keep the bottleneck down by keeping polycounts as low as we can, using mipmapped DDS, etc... and LODs with things that need them. Remember, come render time... polycounts DO matter, and not just in terms of shadows. Wait 'til I show the stuff I'm building, and you see glowmaps and some alpha transperency... it does make a big difference...

smoth · Post by **smoth** » 22 Jan 2006, 07:45

is ~1,200 faces... I handled what detail I could through textures. However the get the geometry accurate to the art I had to use a large poly face count. This was done because the geometry has large rises and falls believe me I would shave of more if I could handle it with a texture. The only area I really use the division of the faces for a texture where the eye is in the front. This is the highest poly model in the mod and they have yet to number past 20 in actual usage.

Now, with LOD yeah, it could be lower, but not really that LOW... again, I understand LOD is nice and all.. it is old news. However, telling me I should go back and do LOD for 82+ models and uvwmap them. That is asking alot.

Min3mat · Post by **Min3mat** » 22 Jan 2006, 17:20

LOL!
Caydr is suggesting this. do u have ANY idea how many units are in AA? plus those from his GEM mod (which is on hold :'()?

Sean Mirrsen · Post by **Sean Mirrsen** » 22 Jan 2006, 18:00

I'll just say that adding LOD support to the engine will not force anyone to make extra models for their mods. In absence of a LOD level, the closest available one would be used, meaning that the unit would remain the same regardless of distance. Those who DO want to make additional models with goblins and such (like me) for close-up viewing, and low-poly models to reduce the load from shadow processing, would at least be able to make them and be happy. I'm having a lot of trouble now, because I'm struggling to make the models for my mod look good close-up, and not bog down the game for people with low-end computers at the same time.

Masse · Post by **Masse** » 22 Jan 2006, 18:07

Sean Mirrsen wrote:I'll just say that adding LOD support to the engine will not force anyone to make extra models for their mods. In absence of a LOD level, the closest available one would be used, meaning that the unit would remain the same regardless of distance. Those who DO want to make additional models with goblins and such (like me) for close-up viewing, and low-poly models to reduce the load from shadow processing, would at least be able to make them and be happy. I'm having a lot of trouble now, because I'm struggling to make the models for my mod look good close-up, and not bog down the game for people with low-end computers at the same time.

i knew ur were doing some mod there... u been mostly quiet nowdays here

in oldays u seemed todo allot

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 22 Jan 2006, 19:36

gem?? ON HOLD?? NEVERRRR.

OK, so I figured out where I got this LoD idea from. It's in the Spring options panel, it says Unit LOD distance. I took that to mean - oddly enough - that units have LOD.

Post by **jcnossen** » 22 Jan 2006, 23:11

Upon closer inspection of the unit drawer, it seems that value is used to stop drawing units in the animated position, and draw units as a static model instead (Which is a lot faster, because the static model data is already located in video memory).
Most modders still focus too much on triangle count I think, even the old crappy cards can draw 2 million triangles easily. What's expensive is setting up the piece transformation matrix which involves actual CPU usage. IE: More pieces are expensive, more triangles are not really. I am guessing every unit could really have 400 triangles or more before you start noticing actual slowdown on a low-end PC.

FLOZi · Post by **FLOZi** » 23 Jan 2006, 00:09

Most of that 'focus' is actually because models are ported from TA mods, redoing all the models in AATA is going to take us a long time, and its a secondary consideration to getting the game both bug free and rebalanced to Spring.

imo

FoeOfTheBee · Post by **FoeOfTheBee** » 23 Jan 2006, 05:16

Do any games implement an algorithm to automatically reduce the detail of models according to distance or user preference without requiring multiple models?

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 23 Jan 2006, 06:23

Do any games implement an algorithm to automatically reduce the detail of models according to distance or user preference without requiring multiple models?

Yes. For example, in HL2-engine games, users can specify "model detail" levels, which essentially shows the users lower-level LODs if they select low-detail display, cutting down on the number of vertexes being rendered, shadowed, distorted/animated, etc. come render-time.

Automatically... a LOT of modern games do it without user intervention. For example, Freelancer (the engine I'm still working on my last mod for) has modder-specifiable LOD-distances. I should remark, however, that since Digital Anvil unwisely chose to "pack" LODs into the model files (i.e., LOD1 and LOD2 are in the same file, not seperated) it's proven very hard for the modding community to make use of that (and several other) features of the original engine. Battlefield 1942/2/Nam/etc. makes use of LOD meshes... lots of other games do, I could probably find dozens just going around Gamasutra for a minute or three...

Now, as for Smoth's model example... if there are 20 of these things in-game, max... no biggie, especially if most of them aren't on the screen (I assume, perhaps wrongly, that that means that the shadows aren't being rendered, making it a non-issue pretty much). If 20 of them are on-screen at once, it's still not a big deal, provided that the final uvmap is not terribly large (let's say 512/512). However... if the model is using multiple uvmaps (bad- three 512's are actually more work per frame rendered, in most engines, than one 1024, even though the 1024 is larger than all three) and if there are a lot on screen at once... models that detailed will pretty instantly grind the game engine to a halt. Looking at the model, I can immediately see some areas (like the back "wings" )where a pre-shaded approach could've saved dozens of tris. And of course, any areas where new geometry was added to allow for a new color/texture are complete wastes, in a uvmapped world. That said- how many polygons could I shave from this model?

I doubt if I could lower its total polycount by more than 200 tris or so without losing essential details, so we're talking 1000+ here. I'd have to see the model first, though- sometimes I see a model like this and can immediately tear out a surprising number of wasted faces, and if Smoth is willing to take me up on it, and email me the geometry, I'll take it on as a demo.

I assume we're talking tris, not quads, btw- every face is 2*2 tris, come render time, because of the way that Spring treats all quads ("faces", for you old-skool OTA modders) as double-sided at render time... a kludge that was put into Spring to prevent many of the relatively efficient models from OTA from looking really cruddy when viewed from low angles. When we move away from 3DO (and trust me, when people start to see what can be done with S3O, they're going to move away from it, really fast), then we'll be losing a lot of the inherent inefficiencies of the older model format. Remember... 3DO was developed from Lightwave, as a custom format, in a day when rigging, bones, muscular systems and ragdoll were still haunting the dreams of Carmack et al- expect the modern world of 3D to not just be prettier, but also better in many ways

PauloMorfeo · Post by **PauloMorfeo** » 23 Jan 2006, 19:51

Argh wrote:
Do any games implement an algorithm to automatically reduce the detail of models according to distance or user preference without requiring multiple models?
Yes. For example, ...

I haven't read your entire post but, are you sure?
I think "detail" here is number of faces. I know that many games decrease texture quality on the models when they get far but i've never heard about decreasing it's detail (number of faces)...

Sean Mirrsen · Post by **Sean Mirrsen** » 23 Jan 2006, 19:58

Not many games today use dynamic LOD generation... actually, I heard something like that about only one game, Far Cry, that used some weird techniques to achieve that, and even that might not be true. Something of the kind was said about SupCom, that it will use dynamic tesselation for the landscape (basically - smoothly degrading landscape detail and quality with distance), but nothing of the kind was said for units. For the developer, it's always easier to make several versions of one model than have to devise a resource-hungry routine that would generate LODs on the fly.

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 23 Jan 2006, 20:43

Hmm... 1200 quads is 2400 triangles. If that's a commonly-seen unit, I don't think that even I would have the gall to use it. But still, I bet you could get at least 50-100 of them onscreen with little, if any, slowdown. Its texture looks, to little old inexperienced texturer me, pretty simple. But then, I'm not familiar with Gundam units at all and maybe there's a lot of detailed textures I'm not seeing. Anyway, assuming that there's basically just a few different shades of yellow with some black stripes or whatever, you could probably get away with a texture as small as 256x256 - that would be a big help in making up for the high polycount afaik.

Guessmyname · Post by **Guessmyname** » 23 Jan 2006, 21:40

Caydr wrote:Hmm... 1200 quads is 2400 triangles. If that's a commonly-seen unit, I don't think that even I would have the gall to use it. But still, I bet you could get at least 50-100 of them onscreen with little, if any, slowdown. Its texture looks, to little old inexperienced texturer me, pretty simple. But then, I'm not familiar with Gundam units at all and maybe there's a lot of detailed textures I'm not seeing. Anyway, assuming that there's basically just a few different shades of yellow with some black stripes or whatever, you could probably get away with a texture as small as 256x256 - that would be a big help in making up for the high polycount afaik.

*psst* Caydr, its not in .s3o format!

smoth · Post by **smoth** » 24 Jan 2006, 06:28

Argh wrote:I doubt if I could lower its total polycount by more than 200 tris or so without losing essential details, so we're talking 1000+ here. I'd have to see the model first, though- sometimes I see a model like this and can immediately tear out a surprising number of wasted faces, and if Smoth is willing to take me up on it, and email me the geometry, I'll take it on as a demo.

I can do that myself and uvw map it IF I had the time. However, seeing another persons aproach can always teach me something. So that being said I would love to see your aproach to the model. If you convert it to triangles you will find a HUGE amount of faces that can be removed... fucking ta and it's squares so when you convert it bear in mind that I had that retarded restriction.

However, if I send you the model, I would like to get it back in a format that I can look at to see where you changed it. Again, alot of the faces you see are there because I was trying to preserve the shape as much as possible.

Shot of the origonal:

Care to explain what you are talking about on the wings?
What format will you need it in?

Click-able Image, in ota you only see them in small squads:

However in spring you can only use them effectively in small groups. this is because they have a HUGE size. I used 3-4 in spring with terrible accuracy and damage yeild.

Caydr, the colors I used were because they were the ONLY ones in the color range of the origonal. Also the texturing was only the team colors, eyes and wings. As you well know flat shadded pollies are NOT high on the hog where rendering is concerned. Something that I am curious about argh.. do you take into consideration that probably over 90% of the faces are flat shaded?

*edit* trying to see what he was talking about.. I now see that I can half the wing face count. I could probably reduce the face count on the head but that would requre 3 textures... so which one is faster? 3 textures or 9 faces only 3 of which are textured with a texture that does not exist yet and will take up more space on our texture bmp*/end edit*

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 24 Jan 2006, 07:27

Whoa, I'm definitely not volunteering to do any uv mapping. I can barely tolerate doing it for my own mod... Crap, I'd never want to texture a unit like that... so many faces at a tricky-to-select angle... The first time you unwrap a model you immediately have a completely different view for any future modeling.

Anyway, sorry if I was way off the mark. Like I said, I have next to no experience. (and I was under the impression that you were intending to s3o your units)

Spring RTS Engine

High poly + low poly