LOD for Scene Efficiency pt.3

Brief explanation of Displacement map explained
It is a technique to cause an effect to a surface to displace, it is much different from normal and bump map that only produce bulging or adding height. Displacement map results in more Depth and detail that permits to produce a high amount of geometry like surface.

Bump sample

Normal sample

Displacement map

In the next step I will show you how to produce Displacement map within MODO.

From part 2 of this tutorial we created identical Columns, now we would want to bake the High poly version mesh to assigned texture map to our Low poly version, first is to have our low poly column UV’d and the high poly version is not necessary to have its UV. Now select the low poly column in its layer and select the High poly column as background layer note that you should align them on the same axis in order to project correctly when baking

Now that everything’s aligned lets go and create a new blank image file where the baking will take place.

Were almost there, and now double click and select you low poly mesh and hit “M” for material and assign “Displacement_Map” don’t worry about the diffuse color at this time and hit “OK”
Next is go to Shader tab and select the “material” under the name “Matr.Displacement_Map” you created earlier, right click it and select duplicate, now that you have a duplicated material you can now right click it + change type + image map. On the rightmost labeled (all) right click+displacement.

Still selected on the image map we will load the UV, blank texture file you saved earlier and assign to it. 1.Go to properties 2. Texture locator 3. Projection type “UV map” 4. UV Map ( I named mine “normal”) from the UV map created earlier from the low poly column.

Its time to create the normal and displacement map, right click on the image map and select “bake from object to texture” also you might want to indicate what kind of map youre about to bake is it Normal map or Displacement map? All you have to do is right click the right most of the image map and select accordingly. If all things set it will automatically render your preferred map and will load on the scene instantly. See direction below.

Rendered map for displacement and normal

That’s it! I hope this tutorial helped your limited resource assets meet the quality and efficiency of the project.

LOD for Scene Efficiency pt.2

In this 2nd part of LOD discussion I will show you how we make scene efficient assets, though im a Modo user (Luxology LLC) and the steps we will follow is from the software I will use, you can also try this with Maya and other 3d package, but tools to use may differ from my version here so this will just serve as a guidelines for those who don’t use Modo.

Making the low poly version

I did a simple cylinder with 8 sides with simple beveling to get the desired shape of what the Column should be or from the reference you are trying to copy.

The object above is presumably in the first layer of your object, now on the second layer create a same cylinder with the same height and same diameter but this time it will be much more defined and with reasonable poly count. You can also copy paste the first created cylinder and paste it in the 2nd layer and subdivide it to increase the polycount to make it smoother, in this case I just created a new cylinder and this time it composed of 36 sides and bevel to shape identical to the first post we created. In other words 2 Columns created one on low detail and the other with the higher detail.

Higher detail post

*note: the top part and bottom part (plates) are separate models and not included in our LOD project, we will only focus on the cylinder as those plates varies from the reference you are copying.

Let us leave the low poly version for now and focus on detailing with the high poly version, I assume youre on the 2nd layer of your model scene so lets begin the details.

Bevel these part of the post to define the inset design, it depends on your liking on how much detail you want, in my case I just did a simple beveling just for the sake of showing you the displacement map generation later in this tutorial.

For the details on the topmost part of the Column its in your own discretion, in this case I did mine with some exquisite design taken from an English artwork, it’s a bit complicated but I wanted to make my model more interesting.They are subdivided polys that I modeled and orient it on the diameter of the topmost part of the post and rotate duplicate it to complete the details.

The completed high detail English Column.

Now that we have 2 models that have the identical shape we can now go ahead with the last part of this tutorial and with the LOD implementation, I will show you how you can generate a normal map and Displacement map within Modo baked from the high Poly model we did.

LOD for Scene Efficiency pt.1

Many times we encounter projects with a great scale of scene, assets within contains are numerous and numerous means giga polycount like city blocks, community area or most common are game contents. How do we tradeoff performance and quality? The answer is LOD.

Level of Detail (LOD) is important to maintain interactivity and still getting 70-80% quality over high number of poly. With high poly contents in the scene it is the best way we impress ourselves in terms of details and realism but too complex to render and the interactive rates are evidently long to process. One solution is to simplify the geometry of those objects that are small and within distance but mostly even large objects can benefit on LOD’s as long as the texture resolution is large enough to support the pixels needed to get better rendering output. It is also called mesh reduction or mesh decimation.

A little sample below explains the benefit of LOD.

Images above show that LOD works well specially when viewed in a distance, it may look impressive in OGL view but it is best when rendered. The image below are the rendered, lights applied and remember the model below is our 500 poly version!

Close up with wireframe visible

By now I guess everyone whos reading this would like to try on their tight deadline projects and rendering time is a big issue. In the next part ill show you how to make LOD object that will help you speed up loading scene time up to 3x quicker and better scene utilization