[SOLVED] might be a stupid question about skeleton/character

[steve3d]

Because our scenes don't need any characters, So I never had chance to get my hands on it.

 

But I have a question about this: If I need to create a character with 3 different resolutions(high, medium, low) how should I create the skeleton and animation?

 

Should I

• create 3 different skeletons for each resolution
  
• or create only one skeleton for high resolution and use different part for medium/low res model
  

 

the 2 method might lead to another problem, if I create 3 skeletons for each resolution, I need to create 3 sets of anmation for every action( three walk animation, three idle animation.. etc...), then every animation must have three sanm file.

 

if I create only one skeleton, I've tryed before, it seems when I use low resolution, the animation for high resolution can't play.. or can be played, but it looks strange.

 

So, what is the correct way to create a character with lod?

[ulf.schroeter]

Not a stupid question at all. The general problem was motivation for this feature suggestion.

[frustum]

Number of bones in skeleton is not a big bottleneck.

 

Approximately approach is: single skeleton with all bones and several surfaces with different number of triangles for different distances.

 

Major number of bones are finger bones, there is a way to disable them:

 

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.

[ulf.schroeter]

Layer with finger bone animation can be disabled on far distances.

 

nice idea ! would it be possible to include automatic distance-based animation layer enabling/disabling directly into ObjectMeshSkinned, e.g. via additional per-layer max visible distance attribute ? Shouldn't be a too big code change, but would simplify distance-based layer blending optimization.

[steve3d]

ha, I'm question a feature that doesn't exist in unigine :mellow:

[alex.dovgodko]

So, what is the correct way to create a character with lod?

We thought about the same problem and decided to use progressive animation frame skipping i.e. skip the number of animation frames depending on the distance to the animated object. These approach gives good results for player characters and NPCs in our MMORPG project.

[ulf.schroeter]

We thought about the same problem and decided to use progressive animation frame skipping i.e. skip the number of animation frames depending on the distance to the animated object. These approach gives good results for player characters and NPCs in our MMORPG project.

 

hi alex, does skipping frames provides any performance benefits ? From my understanding number of numeric calculations per caracter for each render frame are mainly a function of number of bones and active animation layer count. I thought number of frames has only an impact on animation memory footprint.