Chains. When to plane when to model

oXYnary

So these days for modern games. Lets say a third person behind the shoulder. When are chains modeled versus planes? At what size? And when you plane, what type? Like do a flat face on for each individually versus just a one long plane in one direction for all chains as a group with possibly in a X secondary plane with back faces on to be seen from the sides.

What size do you make models versus plane alphas? And which plane version to use?

In this case lets say its about 6ft long and can fit in hands so about a 3" diameter.

EDIT: Oh and yes, they will be boned (but as groups versus each individually)

SHEPEIRO

i would model those... i wouldnt model stuff thast above camera height as its most unlikely that you will get near enough to be bothered about it

i would model stuff high up with two polys (back to back) for each chain link (depends on the engines but in my experience is normally lit correct on each side this way) rotating each link a little, as the odd disapearing link is much more forgivable than the whole thing

only model it as a strip of polys if you can be sure of the veiwing direction

oXYnary

Here is what the purpose is.
(this is high rez version).

Snader

Very dependant on hardware, as well as placement (is it a centerpiece), and artstyle.

In this case, you might want to model, but keep it really lowpoly. You might be able to save a good bunch of polies if you use a 1bit alpha for the center without having it cost too much performance. A pretty small texture (maybe a 128²) and only few pixels on screen should keep it pretty light.



These models are all 20 triangles per shackle, which would end up at about 1280 triangles per chain, 5K for all the chains. A bit poly heavy still, so maybe just a simple box? That would end up around 2-2.5K polies for the chains.

Still too much? Then you could get tricky like this:

This setup would cost you about 160 or so polies per chain, coming to a total of about 6-700 polies for the whole set. Sounds affordable enough.

You can combine the techniques as well, having more detailed ones on eye height (like shep said) for more awesomeness.

BradMyers82

Okay, I might be completely wrong on this, but unless the game is a swing pushing game I'm thinking you would just use simple planes on that.

Like if this was a first person shooter game and you walked up to the swing set, those chanins are so small,I don't think it would warrent modeling them out.

So if this is just a simple prop, I don't think you would model those chains. If its like a really important part of the game, where you actually use the swing, and there is actual game play involved there, then possibly it would be worth modeling them. I suppose a lot of it is dependent on where the camera is and if it will rotate around.

BTW those are some great examples Snader has if you do need to have them 3d or some what 3d.

SHEPEIRO

snaders second image looks good to me

Ott

Don't forget, if your engine supports it you can use normal maps too to really give them added depth. It's really more important to ask "how close the camera can get to the object" and "how important is this in my scene".

Quasar

Snader's second example is great. If you need to, you can reduce the tris even more by getting rid of the center edge and rotating the vertex normals outwards to make the planes look rounded.

THE 5

I'm jsut answereing here cuz I just hours aggo I made the experiacne that planes with normalmaps work wonders. I was playing Demon's Souls (which is 3rd-person) and there are quite some chains in this game. Most of them are realy huge but still just normalmapped planes and I could not tell till I stepped realy close to them and rotated the camera arround. So if you got normalmaps I'd suggest to go with planes.