Creating LoD models, case study 2, Lesson 4

 

Tutorials: Creating LoD models, case study 2, Lesson 4

Creating LoD models

Case study 2: Lesson 4 - The middle ground

This is a very important lesson:

People in Second Life do not see your carefully created mesh!

They may study it every now and then and marvel at all those lovely details but what they actually see as they go about their Second Lives, is mid and low res LoD models. That is how it should be. All those details are not necessary for a scene and there is no computer in the world powerful enough to render everything in an SL scene at speed.

People do notice distortions like the ones in all the GLOD created models though. They drop you straight into the eerie Uncanny Valley where things look almost but not quite right.

For this sign I really needed the chain to look spot on even in the mid level LoD model yet I needed to get the poly count way down since it accounted for almost 7000 of the 7358 triangles in the original. Here's the solution I came up with:



Took a bit of creativity and I could probably have reduced them down even more with no visible effect but with a little bit of reduction to the chain's fastening brackets too, I got the triangle count down to 602 and the land impact down from 13.803 to:



12.859. That doesn't sound like much, does it?

Still better than what GLOD could manage though and unlike GLOD I did it with no noticeable changes at all.

There's an important lesson there: Download weight is calculated separately for each model and then the four numbers are added together. If you really want to reduce the weight, you need to know which model is the heaviest one. In this case it's very clear to see but when I'm in doubt, I do a mock upload, zeroing out the models one by one to see how much each affects the LI.

Lesson 5 - Going low