Neighborhood Blocks with Low-Poly and High-Poly versions

Rakuda

It would be nice to have neighborhood blocks in which the low poly block could be loaded and the house in the foreground could be swapped out with the high-poly version.

Like for instance a block that could be loaded in perhaps 4 or 6 zones. then you could load up the full low-res scene. delete Zone3 Lowpoly for instance and load Zone 3HD where the camera may be in zone 3.

Is this crazy or are there other ways of dealing with such things? Does this make sense?

 

FSMCDesigns

it's not crazy, it's what games do. It's LODs (level of detail models) and used for performance gains. basically you have the high poly detailed version and then several lower poly ones that go down in detail the farther you are away due to how it's programmed.

The best you can do in DS is create a low poly version yourself with decimator or another tool, then load both versions and turn whichever one off depending on camera. Considering the small market here and the amount of work this would take, I doubt a PA would be into taking on something like this, but you never know.

Silent Winter

For rendering, it's often the textures that make it take longer. Search up the free texture-reducer script and apply it to anything not in the foreground (unless the background props are using the same texture maps as the foreground). For the polycount, try Decimator as FSMCDesigns said.

stem_athome

Earlier versions of DS had LOD settings. (I know for sure in DS 2.3, I installed it to check)

You would have the base mesh, then add up to 3 LOD shapes(mesh), Those could then be added into the "Dynamic LOD settings" with a camera distance of when they are switched. You then enabled "Use Dynamic Settings" and you got what is being mentioned. You could also save the scene file with LOD/LOD setting.

With latest DS, you can load LOD mesh, but there are no LOD settings, and the LOD mesh will not save with scene file.

 

It is a shame, as it would be very useful, and I would certainly use it (create buildings with LOD).

 

Gordig

stem_athome said:

With latest DS, you can load LOD mesh, but there are no LOD settings, and the LOD mesh will not save with scene file.

As far as I know, the LOD function in current versions of DS are just for subdivision, and you would have to save the object itself to save the LOD. It would be great to have that function reintroduced to DS, though.

stem_athome

Hi Gordig,

The LOD for an object(mesh) is added via:- Edit-> Object-> Geometry-> Add Level of Detail.

If the mesh and LOD have been added into the runtime correctly, you can use Content-> Utilities-> Add Level of Detail (script)

Care is needed for LOD, as base vertex positions need to be the same on Mesh and LOD.