Fun ? about LOD acronyms
We probably all know that LOD stands for Level of Detail and we probably know what it's for and how it works, but what does SLOD stand for?
What does the S stand for?
Is it:
silhouette level of detail
super level of detail
simulation level of detail
sub-level of detail
Something else?
These are things I've found trying to find the answers on google, hoping some guys in the industry who have worked at SLOD level can clear up what it means :P
I think it is silhouette, as it makes total sense that all this is for is giving a silhouette from far away without any details, but I am assured I am wrong, I may be, I used to think it was "super lod" too, but I have grown to see silhouette as logical, while only people who have worked in the industry and "know for a fact" can confirm what this really means. So, what does SLOD stand for? :P
What does the S stand for?
Is it:
silhouette level of detail
super level of detail
simulation level of detail
sub-level of detail
Something else?
These are things I've found trying to find the answers on google, hoping some guys in the industry who have worked at SLOD level can clear up what it means :P
I think it is silhouette, as it makes total sense that all this is for is giving a silhouette from far away without any details, but I am assured I am wrong, I may be, I used to think it was "super lod" too, but I have grown to see silhouette as logical, while only people who have worked in the industry and "know for a fact" can confirm what this really means. So, what does SLOD stand for? :P
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loud overweight douchebag
Yea, just wanna know what it means once and for all so I can commit to that in my brain.
a programmer mate of mine used to throw SLOD about a bit. I think he was refering to collision proxys.
I like it when people ask questions - show's they're interested and not just nodding along all the time. I like it even more when people speak clear plain English rather than throwing acronyms around all the time. Shows me they know what they're saying and not hiding behing a wall of abstruse terms they may or may not know.
Now actually I dunno either what an SLOD is. Maybe it's just a studio internal term of that one place? Or it's a new games industry buzzword in the making...
If a character is 15 pixels tall, fuck parallaxed normal maps and reflection maps on the eyeballs. Just render the diffuse map + vertex normals. I think UDK calls this the 'fallback shader' but I'm not entirely sure.
You have
LOD0 - standard mesh
LOD1 - optimized mesh for far viewing
SLOD - even further
Actually, I just answered this when grabbing these screens.
it is super lod. Which is a retarded name. But anyway, here is a regular model you'd see in GTA IV:
and here in an SLOD:
While rockstar are not the only one's using SLOD, it is certainly a term that would be alien if you're using Unreal or other engines that can't do half of what GTA IV does. Well, I suppose some of the features of the new march UDK start to catch up with RAGE, but IV had all that shit from the latest UDK demo way back in 2007. Besides tesselation, IV did all that stuff.
You'd never need SLOD in UDK, cause it can't do anything near to the size of Liberty City without fake streaming it supports, and even then, you can't do open world GTA kind of game. I'm not saying you wouldn't use multiple levels of LOD, but they would be sparing and rarely needed with how small worlds are in the visible range of UDK.
To make "super lod" make sense in my mind, I am required to consider it something special about the lod system itself - a successor to conventional LOD.
lol. good question. why go 0, 1, then completely fail to follow the guideline and call it super lod. what about the next lod? super duper lod?
This would be the next lod.
by calling it SLOD you refer to the last LOD, no matter how many LODs are inbetween. Guess you can stay flexible that way when talking about LODS since you don't have to remember how many there actually are.
Kinda like when you have a queue there is a word to describe the beginning element (aka first) and the last element (aka last). With LOD0 being the first and SLOD being the last?
Anyway, feel free to pick my interpretation apart