Management of large, open, densly packed supermarket store with hundreds of products.

ZombieDawgs

This is something I've been trying to figure out for a while. If hypothetically there was a games environment which took place inside a modern, fully stocked supermarket, running at first person AAA specs - what tricks and techniques would work best to keep the entire scene performant, running at a 1024 texel desnity and maintaining some nice detail in the process?

I've dabbled in the past with just straight up LODding the assets unfortunately the scene was still fairly geometry heavy and it was difficult to balance the LODs even in such a small space. 


Assets had to be weirdly scaled and placed in ways that made the store seem emptier/barren, which isn't something you'd usually see.




Texture wise this scene is something you can treat easily with a simple 2k atlas for multiple props.

I'm about to embark on my own personal experiments, but I'd like to know you guys have any insight on the correct way of scaling this up:

sprunghunt

I wouldn't make the items as individual assets at all. Everything should be grouped together into larger assets. And instead of having a new mesh for each product consider using texture variants or even just tints in the shader. 

It's then just a case of keeping the polycount within limits on those assets.