Hey everyone, let me apologize first, I’m typing on my phone.
Just something I thought would be a cool thing to try. The new CoD uses a subdivide feature that subdivides and smooths the mesh the closer you are to it, allowing for much more detailed silhouettes and model fidelity. Essentially transitioning from low to mid to high poly meshes.
Would such a smooth transition between the three models, and any levels between, be possible? The smooth transition between them is my biggest concern.
Yeah, if only modern hardware had some kind of dedicated “Take Extrudable Surfaces, Subdivide, Extrude, LOD, Light And Texture Excellently” units on board.
Wow… thanks for the sarcasm. Or it reads that way. I was just watching the trailer for it and thought, Check it out! You can’t see any hard edges on rounded objects! Thought it would be neat, but wasn’t sure if it’s really a feasible thing… I think Infinity Ward said that they had to write a new engine for it?
I can’t exactly tell who is being sarcastic about what in this thread; the sarcasm levels are all over the charts. But to actually answer your question: they’re likely doing it with a DirectX 11 Tesselation Shader. Unity 4 Pro can do tesselation shaders if you run it in DirectX 11 mode (under preferences → player settings), and it includes a sample tesselation shader in the standard asset Image Effects.
The sarcasm is more directed at Infinity Ward than you, SJ. (And of course I’ll never miss an opportunity to try and be a linguistic smartass).
Anyway, yes, dynamic tesselation allows for a completely smooth transition. If you watch a mesh in wireframe as the camera moves towards/away from it, you’ll see the new edges form and slide away from the existing ones, ensuring that there’s no pop. There are no explicit “low, med, high” meshes to create, though your modelling approach does have to change (e.g. using bezier patches and displacement maps, instead of raw triangles).
If you have Windows and a DirectX 11 GPU, it would certainly be worth having a look at Unity’s tessellation shaders.
They work pretty well, and will help give you a good understanding about how Infinity Ward may have done it.
But as superpig said, you do have be careful with how you create your models.
Otherwise you may not get the result you were expecting.
Sorry about that pig, it’s hard to pick up on things like context in, well, just text. :X I appreciate the clarification. I’m new to game dev, and have barely touched Unity as of yet- I’m spending my time for now building all my assets and fleshing out the story before I get my hands in the nitty gritty of things. I just saw that in the preview and couldn’t think of a game where I’d seen that before… and if I had, it was done so well I couldn’t see the transition!
But using bezier patches, I’ve never really messed with those, I’ve played with NURBS before but my comfort zone has always been just polygons. But good to know about this information, thank you!
Hahaha, that was the problem I had. So unsurprisingly they’re using a feature that’s been around for some time, and to anyone that doesn’t already know about it… so probably the majority of gamers… it’s a big new thing. I only have the free version of Unity for now, and plan to upgrade to Pro later on.
Infinity Wards (That is the team making CoD, right?) whole plan was to make it sound like something new and astonishing. Gamers, that do not know anything about making games (but alot of them seem to the think they do) do not know the techniques behind it. It is therefore easy to just drop a sentence like: “Our new substance techniques allow us to…”. Everyone who doesn’t know that techniques will just freak out and think that the CoD Devs have created something completely new, while in reality, they’re using techniques that are known and have been used in games for years.
It is just a really good way to sell your game. Let the people think that you are so awesome and great and invented thousands of new techs, while in reality, you are just reusing the old ones. They do not lie but on the other hand they do net tell the full truth…
AAA games marketing… That is all I can say about it.
It hasn’t really been around that long… it requires a graphics card that has hardware support for DirectX 10/11, so only newer graphics cards can do it. Xbox 360 and PS3 are too old; they are more or less DirectX 9 GPUs, so for consoles this is definitely a new feature. So I think it’s cool that Infinity Ward is showing it off, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft specifically asked them to show that off. But it’s not something that Infinity Ward themselves invented; it’s something that will probably be used on all the AAA games for Xbox One and PS4.
Or it reads that way. I was just watching the trailer for it and thought, Check it out! You can’t see any hard edges on rounded objects! Thought it would be neat, but wasn’t sure if it’s really a feasible thing… I think Infinity Ward said that they had to write a new engine for it?