Rigging + Animating multiple LODs
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I'm in the process of outsourcing the creation of a 3d character with multiple lods (1 for mobile, 1 for pc / consoles) and I'm wondering if the same rig and animations can be applied to both of these LODs of the character. Is there anything I need to watch out for?
Replies
It does some amazing poly crunching that doesn't lose detail or volume, it will actually push verts out to try and hold the original volume which is something that regular poly crunchers don't do.
It also repairs normals and smoothing, repacks textures and also crunches skeletons.
When it comes to making LODs Simplygon is the best that I've found. Of course you can do a lot of that by hand but you'll murder yourself remaking everything 2-3-4 times over and over again. Which is highly inflexible, the friction it puts on getting changes implemented is a huge bottleneck but with Simplygon you can iterate faster and make small tweaks more often without a lot of effort.
It's not cheap... and they know what they have and how valuable it is to game production but a project not using it, better know what they are getting themselves into and have planned out the impact of doing LODs by hand.