LowPoly (DS/PSP) texturing questions

hansedr

I was wondering if an engine could support tiling textures for buildings? Say you have a 60 story building using the same texture, could you repeat those in a engine? Or how would you do it? I know you can make some planes and snap them together but then that would raise the poly count. From what I have read, the psp can handle approx.5,000 polys per frame but I'm not sure what the DS can do. So if you wanted to make a free roam game and have multiple buildings (or city), how would you do that for handhelds. Any input would be awesome. Also, how do I setup my viewport within Maya to see what the actual pixel size on screen would look like? Thanks

Eric Chadwick

Some info here.
Low Poly Hardware Specs (on going)

hansedr

There was some good info in there. Thanks. I was way off on the PSP frame rate/max ploy count. It didn't really help me with the texturing questions though or the display.

danr

you can tile textures on both platforms. The more you tile, the more you will lose UV accuracy and gain some artifacts, but this depends on your engine and how well it copes. I believe that on both, you start to lose accuracy either side of -4 and +4 ... but really, you need to see it in-engine to judge the effect

ng.aniki

Yes, I worked on a PSP engine which don't allow more than a (0,0)->(1,1) surface on UVs per poly, so yes, it depends of the engine you use.

hansedr

Cool. Thanks for the info. Also, Would you happen to know how to config the viewport to display the screensize of the model as it would appear on a PSP/DS? I see people post 3d models that show the actual in game screen size and was wondering how they are able to determine that. I don't believe they put it in an engine. I know how to create the scale of say a 6foot tall person, but how would that look on a psp/ds screen size.

danr

if you're using max, for screen-like beauty renders :

PSP : set your render size (render scene > common > output size) to 480x272. Then in Render Scene > Renderer, uncheck "anti-aliasing" and check "filter maps" (anti-alising on psp depends on your engine, but it does texture filtering in hardware)

DS : set render size to 256x192, and uncheck filter maps as well as anti-aliasing

for both, also go to customize > preferences > rendering and uncheck "don't antialias against background"

light your scene simply using a couple of directional lights (i think it's a max of 4 on each platform, point lights don't exist), but smooth your models as you need to

for the correct screen proportions in the viewport, right click on the viewport name and select "show safe frame" when you've got your render output set to what you need it to be

hansedr

Cool. I use maya but I think I can make those settings apply. Thanks for the input.

ng.aniki

For the object size it depends of the engine you use too... usually they use real size (1m in maya = 1m in the game), although it worked like this for the engine I worked on.

...But it sucks Because Maya act like shit when working with huge objects/huge world...
Maya is set to work in cm (well, I'm belgian, I don't know how many feet it is), and the engine worked in meters... It was a racing game where we ride on very large distance. When we bypass something like 10.000 m (The spaceships were huge the track were huge too ) maya bug everytimes.. (v2008)

renderhjs

at least in max intern units rather count- so if you use max better set the units to generic units