November 5th, 2020 - Ben & Jace Talk: Mesh Imposters / LODing (Part 1)

November 5th, 2020

Ben & Jace Talk: Mesh Imposters / LODing (Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omjFqZQV9fI&t=974

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    1. Ben

      So, technically, vertex animations is a form of optimization you've been doing.

      But the other thing, which is definitely not in yet, I hope I can push this with update 4, is I made...

    2. Jace

      I mean, that's amazing.

      That looks like a plushie.

      Honestly, it kind of does.

      I want to squeeze it.

    3. Ben

      So currently, people with poor GPUs are kind of crying out for better optimizations, which is totally legit to ask for because we have a lot of things that we didn't optimize yet.

      So as it is now in the live build, we don't have...

      imposters for meshes.

      So an imposter is something that should represent, but it is not the same.

      It's a form of loading, a level of detail.

      So what you would do on a distance, you would, I'll show it with the constructor.

      You can, of course, force that.

      So this is the first lot and you get further away.

      This is the second lot.

      As you can see, details got reduced.

      Now if the third lot where

      it became a beautiful mess.

      And then the fourth lot where it even became a more beautiful mess.

      And then at one point it just becomes this really simple shape that should represent the same mesh.

    4. Jace

      And so this changes as you move further and further away.

      So you shouldn't TM notice.

      You shouldn't.

      But you will notice the performance increase.

      Yeah.

    5. Ben

      We noticed some GPU gains

    6. Jace

      on it,

    7. Ben

      which was good to see.

    8. Jace

      Okay, so that was loading that you just demonstrated.

      So then what are these imposters then?

    9. Ben

      So imposters is technically just the last lot, only then extremely simplified.

    10. Jace

      Okay.

    11. Ben

      So it's almost a box.

      Storage containers.

    12. Jace

      Oh, okay.

      So those, just the really, really low-quality ones, they're considered, they're called imposters.

    13. Ben

      Yeah, and on the distance, you cannot see if it's the last lot or first lot, really.

      So that's the idea behind it.

      It's like,

    14. Jace

      do

    15. Ben

      you see a difference between this until you zoom in?

      Yeah, right, right, right.

      Oh, that's really cool.

      And

    16. Jace

      as

    17. Ben

      you can see of the geometry...

      Holy

    18. Jace

      shit!

      Wow!

      Can you just zoom in on that a little closer?

      Folks at home, playing along at home, can notice the difference in the mesh.

      So you can see the complexity there.

      A lot less polys on something that you can hardly make out anyway in the distance.