# of sides on a barrel
I suddenly became unsure how many sides I should spend on a barrel, the low-poly version. UDK. It isn't an asset with great importance or anything, just your typical prop.
Is there sort of a standard agreed upon, how many sides you need to give the impression of round, like 12? The smoothing will probably help as welll.
Is there sort of a standard agreed upon, how many sides you need to give the impression of round, like 12? The smoothing will probably help as welll.
Replies
In this case I was thinking of a somewhat realistic approach, I actually completed one with 12 sides, but I'll save it for another project another time, and go for one with some more detail for this one. 12 was a little on the short side.
I'll try out what TeriyakiStyle said, 24 with LOD. LODs are so easy to setup in UDK as well, so that'll work out great. And yeah, this is FPS.
People need to understand polycount is the least of our probs on this gen.
pencil - 3 sides,
thick rope (normal wrist size) - 4 sides
post ( bout one foot in diameter,)- 5 sides
from ther up double the sides for every time i doubled the diameter, so
2 foot diameter cylinder would be 10 polys, 4 foot 20 polys
i like making personal rules like that,, it buges the hell out of me in games when i see a tire on a truck wiht like 12 sides,, then next to it a small pipe with 20 sides.
Until you run it on the PS3.
I dont like using random numbers like 10 or 20 or 17 or that stuff, i like to do 4,6,8,12,16,24,32 etc as they all can be LOD'd into sensible numbers, and your uv seam goes in a sensible place, this is especially important if you have more than 1 LOD, say you use 26 sides, lod 1 is 13 sides, lod 2 is 7.5 sides, and you may screw up your uvs.
barrels can afford some more sides these days, but make the amount of sides an even number.
Wow way to contribute DarthNater.....
Mojokey's personal rules are great idea.
Another thing about lods to take into account is if its actually worth it to load and store and swap out another model that might be only saving a few more tris. I've read a few places that unless it shaves off 1/3rd of the tris its not worth it.
Also shader lod on average has the chance to effects performance more than tri count. I don't remember where it was I read all that as it was more than a year ago but... its something to keep in mind and ask the tech heads about.
Which goes back to what was said about tri count really not being the biggest issue anymore. Materials are the new polycounts
Uh, really?
In uncharted 2 drake is about 25k in game and 80k on the cinematics
http://i37.tinypic.com/20a2fs8.jpg
vig what you said bears true we started WAR making lods for everything, and even making shadowcaster objects, but by mid cycle it was determined that it was taking more of a hit swaping everything out, so we pretty much stoped making lods on all but the most extreme cases
yay I hate lod popping!
Speaking of that, maybe this isn't the place for it, but...
Has anyone noticed if you install a game onto your xbox hard drive and play it that it seems the LOD popping happens more than if you just play from the disc? I notice it a lot more in Gears 1 than any other game...
Yes. Talk to rendering SEs.
I guess I should clarify that I'm talking about multi-platform games here, but I should think that's obvious since comparing two platforms with two different platform-exclusive titles is fairly meaningless.
I thought you were just being a fan boy and saying the ps3 and deal with high polycounts. I'm curious in cry engine 3 what console can handle more tris.
Dont count on me too much, though; my memory is kind of fuzzy. I cant find the right article for some reason.
sounds about right, particle stuff looked better on the ps3 on gtaIV, but xbox did better with LOD fog and popping.
I got some good answers though, so it's all cool.
In the end, of course it just comes down to, it depends. And that's on a lot of things. And in games there's a lot of tricks you have to do in regards to optimization other than just reducing polycount and choosing appropriate texture resolutions.
What was said about LODs, that it could actually degrade performance, that was interesting. Specifically, when to bother with LODs, someone said they'd heard if it didn't cut down to 1/3 of the polys don't bother.
Or maybe a specific polycount, why bother with LOD on a 500 polygon object, if your system target is DX10 and 11 GPUs and Quad core CPUs. Unless there would be 500 copies of that object in the room.
BTW: How does UE3/UDK deal with objects that way, is there any instancing techniques going on to help with the performance, when I place out 500 copies of the same static mesh in a room. Not that I would do that.
I just realised...
Crates are just barrels with four sides!
That's not true entirely true. As far as I know we've been having problems with the polycount on PS3.
Where the PS3 appears to be good with shaders, xbox360 is way better at handling higher loads of geometry on the screen.
Yep theres a game comparison on Eurogamer, and with the PS3 they had to cut the polygons down to keep equal framerate with the 360 which means it has less enemies, but it does have a higher res on the PS3 so looks a bit more detailed.
The xbox has more memory and a more traditional gpu. Take that for what you will, but it's not true that either is 'better at polygons'.
Hehe, after I wrote my previous post I wondered if it wasn't the other way around. Thanks for correcting me.
I'm probably going offtopic; what about the texture quality? Are there any major differences between two platforms, and if so are they caused by different texture sizes or PS3's implementation of AA (which very often makes things blurry). Feel free to ignore these questions if you can't spill the beans
Texture quality should be the same for both platforms because of texture streaming.
It's still two different platforms that render stuff a little bit different, but it shouldn't be that noticeable, more than that I can't say. And yes, let's not make this a console war thread.
Cool idea. I will adapt those rules to my needs.