I am working on an personal asset, but I thought it might be worth putting on the asset store to sell. So I want to make it as modular as possible, and so I am making multiple levels of detail for it so it has more utility across platforms/game types.
This seems really obvious as I’m working on it, but I haven’t seen a straight answer on the internet so I thought I’d gather some opinions – as I go through and customize my lower resolution versions of the model, it is necessary to lay out the UV’s again as some portions of the model I’ve literally replaced with cubes and cylinders.
So whatever textures I make for the high res model aren’t going to 1:1 map to the lo res. So, it is inevitable that I have to make different textures maps for the different UV sets, right?
But there is no reason to lower the texture map resolutions, as that can easily be done in engine by users preference. So the final product will be a high res mesh with 4k, 2k, 1k, and 512 maps, a low res mesh with its own maps in the same sizes, and prefabs set up with LOD group script attached.
Additionally, for a rifle asset, should it be rigged?
I found a bit more about this, and after some experimentation my opinion now is this:
Organic surfaces: decimation or Maya’s LOD creation is probably fine for the most part. Just take the finished version with textures and run this, see how it turns out, tweak if needed.
But for hard surface stuff, in my current case a rifle, I found the automatic LOD creator in Maya to give unwanted results. I haven’t tried Decimation Master in Zbrush, but I found that just going through manually wasn’t that long of a process and gave me complete control. Basically, I just deleted all edge loops holding bevels, and every other edge loop on cylinders, and got rid of small details complelety. Cut my tri’s by more than half, and the final result looks very similar to the original.
But because I did replace some complicated pieces like the rear sight post completely with simplified geometry, I went ahead and layed out the UV’s again entirely. This means I have to texture the reduced version separately, but with substance painter this is just a matter of saving the materials I built for the full version and reapplying them. Some normal details would be needed to be redone, but if the model is meant to be a lower LOD version, these probably won’t be necessary anyway.
Use that, its upcoming tech to unity engine. It has bindings for simplygon, and mech decimater and others. Use whichever lod generator you want, and combine with that autolod for amazing results.
Your welcome
P.S we use it for hard surface lod and it works fine, you just need to make sure you have created your models properly and set up your lods properly.
Proper models, in this case, means quads, triangles, and no bizarre edge flow, I take it? I think for my hard surface stuff, that may still be an issue because to get the minimum amount of geometry, I end up with lots of high valence poles where I’ve tucked away all edges no holding shape. So there is weird geometry, but still all quads and tri’s. That’s why the auto-decimation systems tend to collapse parts that you don’t want.
And setting up LOD’s properly, this means assigning the appropriate suffix, in Unity this means LOD_01 or whatever it states in the documentation?
Note: I don’t mean to ask those questions directly to you, as I can find the answer easy enough. I’m just writing my thoughts out for anybody in the future who views this as a reference.
For LODS: Yes but also I mean making sure you are using the right amount of LOD levels and LOD bias for the size of your scene, setting up correct clipping planes on your camera.
For models: yes tris and quads, making sure that you are using the right normal format, making sure that you have no lamina faces etc etc (run cleanup operations) all the normal stuff you should be doing anyway.
Generally as long as i am using the right amount of LOD levels and LOD bias for the given scene size and camera settings, I always get a smooth transition.
If this isnt enough, look up “LOD Crossfade” and try and either buy or make a solution based on that.
