LoD for important models

[scheusso]

LoD creation for important models

Motivation

The reason to do this task is to improve our performance. At the moment there is a huge framedrop when a lot of models are loaded into a level because they're all displayed/rendered at full detail. There is a lot of potential performance gain by using the LoD technique and render only low detail versions of objects that are not to close to the camera.

Task outline

Your task is to create lower LoD (Level of Detail) versions for important models such as assff, HXY-Ship, Spacestations and maybe also Weapons mounted on these Ships.

LoD

Level of Detail is a technique which saves information to create lower detailed versions of a model.

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See also ​this

Techniques

There are several ways to make this:

• use OgreMeshUpgrade: this way you can (interactively) define:
  • number of leves of detail
  • number of faces removed per level
  • distance at which each lod becomes active

the script saves the information directly into the mesh and there are no additional steps required to get LoD to work

• create lower detailed versions of model yourself
  • export them to mesh
  • convert high lod model from mesh to xml using OgreXMLConverter
  • manually insert lower detailed models into xml of high detail version

see also this ​thread for more information

Things to figure out

The following things have to be figured out (probably by trying different variants)

• how many LoD's does a sepcific model require?
• what should be the reduction rate of faces per level?
• at which distance should the levels become active ?