How can I make powerlines?

SeanWink

I am trying to model a transmission tower and I want to make these powerlines using a transparent texture. Am I going to need a bunch of line segments in the plane for the texture to work because the image is stretching?

I want this model to be used in a game engine so I don't want much polygons on the powerlines.

I usually texture in substance and clip studio and was going to make the powerlines just a black line across the UVs.

Eric Chadwick

I would suggest NOT using an alpha blended surface for these. The texture is going to be filtered with distance, and the lower MIPS will be very blurry.

It's generally better to just use pure opaque geometry. Include enough cross-sections to reduce long thin triangles, which can cause performance issues with some GPUs. Besides, the extra edges will give a smoother curvature to the hanging wires.

What engine and what hardware are you targeting with these assets? Mobile for example is going to have very different needs than console than PC.

SeanWink

I'm using Unity and targeting mobile.

poopipe

geometry is cheap - start with that and only start thinking about doing something clever if you really need to.  

Klunk

slightly beyond the scope of the discussion.... @ codies they had very impressive power lines in Colin McRae (though might have been f1 memory is a bit hazy ) , IIRC it was done as antialiased curves drawn as postprocessing effect.... It had the benefit of a nice smooth line with no vert corners and none of the shimmering/dropping in and out of thin geometry.

poopipe

that's fairly sneaky, I like the sound of it. 
we generate meshes that lod dynamically and a shader that compensates for aliasing/handles lighting (it's a more general cable-like thing rendering solution) but I'd probably go for something like that if it were just powerlines in the distance

dimwalker

Low-end devices might have aliasing problems. If that's not a problem in your case - use geometry.
Otherwise use planes with alpha. Make sure to create wires wide enough to compensate for mipmaping or you might end up with textures blurring so much it exceeds the geo, bringing aliasing problem back.

poopipe

Alpha blended transparency won't suffer aliasing problems but it will suffer from sorting issues - eg. with foliage between the camera and the powerline 

It's also expensive to render (granted there's not going to be much screen coverage in this case) 

If the op is happy to fiddle with shaders there are a few options available depending what n the style they're going for