Transferring animations and rigs onto different LOD models?

barnesy

Hi Polycount,

I'm in the process of making a 150,000 polygon character which needs to be rigged and animated.

I also need to make a mid and low detail version of the model which is also rigged and animated.

I was wondering if there's a way that I could paste both the rigging and animation data from the the high detail model onto the other LOD's without having to re-rig or re-animate?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Farfarer

What application?

GlowingPotato

Depending on the render engine, there should be an auto LOD system that uses tessellation to work, so the animation would work normally.

i think all big engines have a auto LOD system, or you can manually set the LOD meshes and the engine will do the vertex weighting automatically.

antweiler

Why dont you simply bind your LODs to the same rig (skeleton) and export them separately (if there is no engine specific workflow for that)
You should be able to transfer the skinweights from highrez to LOD easily (easy f.e. in Maya but also in Max, from what i hear)

barnesy

Sorry I should have specified the application. I'll be using 3ds max for this, then it will be going into an in house renderer (which doesn't have a LOD/Tessellation system)

The idea is that they want 3 LOD's to show off crazy shaders etc

There isn't going to be any distance based model switching, just 3 separate versions of the model to show how it handles the shaders with different density meshes.

I've copied and pasted skinning weights/ rigs between similar models when doing modular based character work in the past but I remember it kicking a fuss if one vert number was different, yet alone the entire mesh being different lol

Popol

Just use the Skin Wrap modifier.

If you've never used it here's how:

- apply the Sky Wrap modifier on the mesh without skin
- in Parameters, click "Add" and select the skinned mesh
- set Falloff to 10
- tick "Weight all Points"
- Click "Convert to Skin"
- Clean up the new Skin modifier created (it's just a projection it won't be perfect)

That's the only way to transfer skin between meshes that have a different vertex count/order (Well, the only way I know)

barnesy

Thanks Polpol, I will give that a try when I have prepared the models.

I don't suppose that there's a way of doing something similar with UV's so that I don't have to unwrap each LOD model?

Popol

The best way to not have to unwrap each LOD would be to create the lower LOD by cutting manually geometry from the highest LOD already unwrapped. So no need to unwrap as long as you don't remove an edge on a UV border. And no need to redo any bakes and texturing.

Now, If your LOD are different models, there's not much you can do as far as I know. Just unwrap them and project each map from the highest LOD.