Model pimpage Thread

[joe_rogers_11155]

i dont want to get too far off topic here but banter and bekey are correct. in a training or combat situation, i carry my m4 and m9 all over the place and it has to go anywhere i go (like the bathroom and the cafeteria for instance). it gets to be a pain. it becomes more of a pain when some dummy loses his weapon - those are sensitive items and if they get lost the whole base gets shut down so they can look for it...

but the most painful thing i can imagine is not having my weapon with me when i need it.

and then when i jump into a videogame like MW3 or BF3 to release the stress of a long day's work, i tend to stay away from weapons like M16 and M9, and lean more towards unconventional weapons like the riot shield (which i have unlocked all the way, VERY FUN) and the SMAW with extra rockets, respectively.

And of course, I'm always a fan of unconventional weapons and really wierd grungy magical stuff. You guys ever play a game called Lo Wang: Shadow Warrior? That's where the shuriken gun and the flaming severed head weapon came from. I would love to see Shadow Warrior: Source one day, lol. Such a great game. It's like Duken Nukem 3D but with a japanese motif and it's chock full of the ultraviolence and secret wall-doors we craved back then.

[Gambini]

You don´t mess with the lo-wang!

I like sword, it´s a personal weapon

I have those and some more lines stuck in my head from times when I didn´t even know what they meant. Shadow warrior, a great game. Too bad I disagree about the weapons, I prefered the multicannon shotgun and the machinegun.

[Stormy]

When I was in the army on excersize with some marines one of my mates traded a live grenade for a dudes m4. They didn't give a fuck, it was great. I got some hardcore gear like heaps of sleeping bags and full uniform and shit. I think they liked our stuff more than we liked theirs though. Being in the army didn't affect my opinion on weapons at all. I didn't care for them then and I don't care now.

[Saxon]

Made a low poly Ferfrans SOAR - 3500 polies.
UV'd and AO'd it, currently need to texture it

[Epifire]

So I just got into modeling again in XSI, and I now learned some bits of the Rendermapping system. So just to show a preview of something that may or may not go into my Ravenholm mod here is a metal fence prop I have been constructing...



Because we all get tired of seeing the flat Valve fence alpha textures. This prop is a replacement for the fences up close, cause I get tired of trying to work around not letting people close to the texture version of this in Half-Life 2. I gotta hand a lot of thanks to Black Stormy though, since he really helped and inspired me to get back into this stuff again.

[Stormy]

looks good man! I would suggest you give it a lod though, that looks like it could get expensive at a distance.

[Epifire]

:D looks good man! I would suggest you give it a lod though, that looks like it could get expensive at a distance.

I was just thinking that myself. So I gotta find that txt that contains the various QC lines so I know what to use on that.

[Stormy]

Code: Select all

$lod 20 { replacemodel old.smd new.smd }
{ replacematerial old.vmt new.vmt }

[stoopdapoop]

whoa-whoa-whoa

How many polygons is it? there's almost no way that adding an lod model will increase performance, all it will do is waste ram and waste addition CPU cycles.

That model will take less time to render than it takes for the driver to switch states.

Don't take my word for it though, test it out yourself.

Depending on how you've modeled it, that model may actually render faster if you add polygons, too.

[Saxon]

Basically finished my Ferfrans rifle now. The right side of the gun is less detailed, I could probably do more with it but honestly no one will ever really see that side (depending on how it's animated ).

[Stormy]

Stoopdapoop you're probably right, I just lod the fuck out of everything for the sake of it. More to change to smaller image files than model resolutions. I don't quite understand the adding more polies to make it cheaper to render though, care to explain?

[Gambini]

whoa-whoa-whoa

How many polygons is it? there's almost no way that adding an lod model will increase performance, all it will do is waste ram and waste addition CPU cycles.

That model will take less time to render than it takes for the driver to switch states.

Don't take my word for it though, test it out yourself.

Depending on how you've modeled it, that model may actually render faster if you add polygons, too.

It´s not like it´s a model that will be placed only once. Let´s suppose he puts 60 of those in a map and that its polycount is 500. The game would be rendering a constant amount of 30K polygons (About the same than 2 gmans and 2 alyx being rendered altogether).

Now imagine that you take a flat screenshot of it and make an alpha channel texture that looks just like it and make the lod model based on that. This lod model will be have 4 polygons which multiplied by the amount of copies (60) it would be 240.

[Gambini]

@B_Stormy: I think it´s more the fact of how many polys are being rendered per frame than performance itself. Maybe lod models take almost as much as they save performance-wise. But considering engines like Source have a limit of polys per frame it is still worth. Also, you allow low profile computer users to play high end games.

[Gary]

It might be nearly free. And depending on which Source game you put it in, it will be rendered via the fastpath(L4D, ASW, P2, CSGO, etc).

[stoopdapoop]

Stoopdapoop you're probably right, I just lod the fuck out of everything for the sake of it. More to change to smaller image files than model resolutions. I don't quite understand the adding more polies to make it cheaper to render though, care to explain?

Of course I'm right. I'm always right. And yeah, I can understand the want to change texture resolutions, but even so, you lose more than you gain on small inexpensive props like these.

And sure, I'll explain why more polygons can render faster than fewer polygons in some circumstances.

When it's time for your cpu to send polygons to your gpu, it has to batch them into one of several available types of "geometric primatives" These include the triangle fan, strip, indexed list, and un-indexed list. The fans and strips are very fast and and have almost no repeated data, so they're used often. Unfortunately most models require several of these primative objects to fully compose a model, and it takes time for the gpu to start and finish constructing a primative, so you want to try to fit your model into as few primatives as possible to minimize the amount of time spent switching primitives.

One way to ensure that polygons are assembled together is to make sure that they're all connected and part of the same smoothing group. So instead of having several discontinuous meshes in a model, which saves on raw polygon count, you could connect them and allow them to be shaded together, which saves on primitive assembly, shading, and a small amount of ram (and is therefore faster.

Now I'm not saying that he should connect all the polies and make them all part of the same smoothing group, this would be an example of a pretty extreme micro-optimization and the model is already free anyway. I'm just saying that if raw performance was key, then you could save some draw time(ON THE GPU ONLY) by doing it that way.

It's important to note that ANY optimizations that are done to that model will be moot, because as I said, it takes longer to switch states in the driver(on the cpu) than it does to actually render the model(on the gpu). So putting more strain on the CPU(in the form of LODs) in order to save work for the GPU is pretty senseless in this particular case, considering that the CPU is already the bottleneck for all inexpensive models.

It´s not like it´s a model that will be placed only once. Let´s suppose he puts 60 of those in a map and that its polycount is 500. The game would be rendering a constant amount of 30K polygons (About the same than 2 gmans and 2 alyx being rendered altogether).

Now imagine that you take a flat screenshot of it and make an alpha channel texture that looks just like it and make the lod model based on that. This lod model will be have 4 polygons which multiplied by the amount of copies (60) it would be 240.

GPU performance is a lot more complicated than figuring out how many polygons are in a scene. In fact, when working on practical models and scenes, it's one of the least important aspects. You make it seem like 2 gmans and 2 alyx's is a lot, but that's only like 8-9 common infected. But there's a serious problem with your example, you shouldn't have 60 of ANY PROP in ANY PVS. DirectX 9 shits all over its self when you have too many discrete models in a scene, you'd be much better off batching those things into groups of 3 or 4, that will actually save you rendering time. Doesn't matter if you have 60 5 polygon models, or 60 1000 polygon models.

And source does not have a limit on the number of polygons found in studio models. That "too many verts in frame" error only applies to brush verts, not model verts.

Back when I was a noob I would drop a bunch of these models...(note the polycount)

into a scene and wonder why my framerate was barely affected. Little did I know that polycount was only a small piece of the performance puzzle.

And gary, correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think that rendering models using the fast path is an automatic optimization, I think it's pretty explicit which models get fast pathed.