Light Bulb Polycount workaround

kimchee519

Hey guys quick question, I'm working on a arcade environment and many of the assets deal with lots of those little light bulbs that attract people's attention on the more old school arcade/fair games. I was wondering if there is any way to model them without using to many polys. In order to get the silhouette right I had to use a fair amount of polys for one light bulb that will be duplicated many many times to look decent. If there was any tip for trick to getting good looking bulbs without so much polys that would be awesome, kinda like the chain trick technique found here --- > http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74502

kimchee519

I'm not sure why my photobucket pictures are broken, so here are the links for my light bulb troubles and reference.

http://s786.photobucket.com/user/snowjessb/media/lights_zpsd1fef70b.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1

http://s786.photobucket.com/user/snowjessb/media/lights_maya_zpsc2411ca1.jpg.html?sort=3&o=0

Eric Chadwick

Yeah you have a lot of polys there. You could go with a much simpler shape. Thanks for the chains link, added those images to the wiki. Some more topology ideas here, fwiw.
http://wiki.polycount.net/SphereTopology

kimchee519

Thanks Eric I would like to go for a simpler shape of the light bulb, but I still have to reuse it many times throughout my environment, I really don't want it to look boxy in any way because it will be seen quite often in the scene.

Eric Chadwick

It depends how close the player/camera will get to the lightbulbs, and what platform you're targeting. Is it for mobile? Console? PC?

kimchee519

PC UDK, the player is going to be fairly close to the bulbs yes.

kimchee519

Thanks Perna. If I optimized the bulb the way you said, do you think it would be okay to have a lot of these around my scene like shown in the picture running in UDK? Or will that bog my scene down because there are very many of them. I just don't see any other way to achieve the look I'm going for.

Eric Chadwick

Yep. You have to do some profiling to tell what your limits are.

Generally speaking, you can use a ton of vertices, if your shaders are fairly simple. But you'll only know what the limits are by doing some performance profile tests.

Luka

kimchee519

Awesome thanks Luka

Luka

no problem. one more thing. you may want to get rid of the very last loop there and sustitute the shape with a normal map.

passerby

also consider that these will emit light and likly bloom out a little in the game engine, which the bloom effect can be a easy way to cover up how low poly they are.

WarrenM

I'll throw a comment in here too that if your art director wants a bunch of light bulbs in the players face ... they're going to have to accept some polygons.

Snader

Not sure if it's still of any use, but I'm gonna say slightly modified geospheres.


80 triangles apiece. Though you can of course use a different geosphere as a base, this one seems to be a bit chunkier than you might want.

CheeseOnToast

also consider that these will emit light and likly bloom out a little in the game engine, which the bloom effect can be a easy way to cover up how low poly they are.

Passerby is bang on here. We recently had to make a similar array of lights, and went much lower on the polycount than you have. By the time they're glowing and/or flashing, the player will never notice.