[SOLVED] Character LODs

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hello, here I want to ask a general question about character and LODs. We are plannuig to have 40 characters in a scene, all quite detailed and well animated. (This all has to be defined, so I leave this quite undefined for now). Do you think, that there is need of a LOD system, performance wise. Is there a LOD system for skinned meshes, does it work similar to this https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/1.0/tutorials/lods/ ? How would I need to prepare a custom system? Is there a LOD system for rigs as well? If someone has ideas and thoughts .. would help me. Cheers Werner

[frustum]

You can use same approach for skinned meshes. Reduce the number of riged bones for the distant LODs for better performance.

[ulf.schroeter]

https://developer.unigine.com/forum/topic/935-solved-instancing-skinned-meshes/?p=4665

[werner.poetzelberger]

Hi,

 

thanks for answer.

Reducing the number of bones is the goal, yes.

 

So I have to look at animation layers.

 

As described in the post of frustum, 

Finger bones should be excluded or have zero weight on distant surfaces.

Animation of fingers can be stored into the separate .sanim file, because of hierarchical skeleton.
Layer with finger bone animation can be disabled on far distances.

 

Turning off layers of animation means taking out those bones of the calculation, of rig and skinning?

 

I would need some substitute for the e.g. finger, lets say a hand bone?

 

If this is working, and also replacing meshes dynamically, on skinned objects, this would do the trick.

 

Our own experiences showed, that mainly the bones/rig calculation on the cpu is the expensive part.

 

So I also think, that replacing rig or parts of it disable etc. is quite important.

I definitely will look into that.

 

But this gives me some ideas, and I am happy to see this already addressed.

 

 

cheers

 

werner