Character LODs

MightyT

Hello, trying to create character LODs using crytek 3.4.1. Tried to use the documentation found over at the CryWiki, but the file they provide for me to follow along with seems to be vastly different from what the documentation says it includes. The file itself seems to be very much at odds with what has worked in the past for me, with an abrupt stop to naming conventions or hierarchy setups.

Basically, if I have 2 character meshes in a scene, with one named "bob", for starters what would the LOD be called? $lod1? Would that then be hierarchically linked to "bob", or would they be exported separately. Got a bit of an issue last time I tried to export 2 things weighted to the same skeleton. Frankly I'm at a total loss on where to begin, and can't seem to find any information online. Going forward without LODs seems careless. Hoping to figure out a method before progressing through too many more models. Haven't begun to think about what this will do to morph targets and talking heads...

Ghogiel

I think I read somewhere in the docs that having separate LOD files was a legacy function, and the preferred method was linking everything up in the scene and just exporting one file is the way forward.

Anyway, yeah you are correct.
link all the LODs directly to the render mesh and name them $lod1, $lod2, etc.
Off the top of my head merge all nodes is unticked. Pretty much all there is to it.

I've seen both ways in scenes/files I have worked on, but only ever set mine up via linking and exporting into one file.

leleuxart

The naming conventions differ depending on what modeling program you use, but I'm pretty sure the preferred method now is linking the different versions in their own group, all in the main mesh group. That's how I've gotten mine to work from Maya.

For my Maya setup, it's:

cryexportnode_MainModel
-MainModel_group
--MainModel
-_lod1_MainModel_group
--_lod1_MainModel

Hopefully that makes sense. Maya's LODs use _lod#_, instead of Max's $lod#