How would you make window blinds (and yet remain low poly)?

allengingrich

Obviously I can just make window blinds as they are in real life, but in my experiments, it takes a lot of polys to make it look convincing. Even when I do, the little slats don't look convincing in-engine. They seem to almost disappear from a ways out.

It's been a while since I asked how to model anything specific, but how would you guys tackle this?

Thanks!

Mark Dygert

It depends on the style of the game and the style of the blinds.
Is it low poly stylized or high poly hyper realism? 
Are they large chunky slats? Thin metal? Rice paper accordion? 
Are they open, closed, up, down, partial?
Do they animate?
How important are they to the game? Are they a hero prop that play a pivotal role or is it just background clutter? 
Do they need to achieve something specific, like blocking line of sight?
Do you need to see them from across the city, room
How big Is the character in relation to your blinds, are they a human, ant or a giant? 1st person, 3rd person or god mode? 
Can you use LOD's? Custom make meshes for each step away? Up close, highest detail, every slat modeled. Step back and it collapses to a simplified mesh with enough edges to hold its silhouette. Step back again and it's a single poly.
Can you combine the LOD's all onto one texture sheet to save draw calls?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered and each one of these will probably unpack 2-3 more questions. Asking and answering all of that will guide you in the right direction. There isn't one way to build something, but techniques that work best under different scenarios. Deploying the right technique means being mindful of the process and what is required. Good luck, I hope this helps.

allengingrich

Mark Dygert said:

It depends on the style of the game and the style of the blinds.
Is it low poly stylized or high poly hyper realism? 
Are they large chunky slats? Thin metal? Rice paper accordion? 
Are they open, closed, up, down, partial?
Do they animate?
How important are they to the game? Are they a hero prop that play a pivotal role or is it just background clutter? 
Do they need to achieve something specific, like blocking line of sight?
Do you need to see them from across the city, room
How big Is the character in relation to your blinds, are they a human, ant or a giant? 1st person, 3rd person or god mode? 
Can you use LOD's? Custom make meshes for each step away? Up close, highest detail, every slat modeled. Step back and it collapses to a simplified mesh with enough edges to hold its silhouette. Step back again and it's a single poly.
Can you combine the LOD's all onto one texture sheet to save draw calls?

There are a lot of questions that need to be answered and each one of these will probably unpack 2-3 more questions. Asking and answering all of that will guide you in the right direction. There isn't one way to build something, but techniques that work best under different scenarios. Deploying the right technique means being mindful of the process and what is required. Good luck, I hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply! I just mean standard blinds. Like plain white, plastic blinds. I want them to be realistic -- not stylized.

I've been modeling for a long time, I can model some blinds :P I'm just saying they look really weird in engine for some reason because I'm not giving them thickness (because doing so will quadruple the poly count). Is there some way to account for this in a lower poly way? I've never dealt with an object with such thin parts before. Does that make sense?

Here's what I mean:

Butthair

The method doesn't work very well in gta either..


How about a texture for the "block" of blinds and a couple of thin boxes for the more seperate ones?

If you need to keep it geo then delete a lot and you'll still have that "abandoned" look.

Joopson

Personally I'd just bake down a few high-poly variants to a plane, and use that. Of course, from the side it might not look great, but it'd shade nicely and look good from the front.

poopipe

Lods are the answer if you want them looking good up close - a few thousand tris isn't a problem on most hardware provided you drop it off pretty quickly.  You could try being clever with parallax shaders etc. But the cost would likely be a lot higher than just modelling the details

JordanN

Naughty Dog had this cool LOD they implemented in Crash Team Racing. They would model a door in complete 3D detail for close ups, and as you drove away, the 3D model would turn into a 2D texture, but it looked identical. 

And this was on the PS1. If they can get away with using polygons then, there's no reason modern games shouldn't either.