LOD's?

Hidamari

hey guys, i was wondering how the game works out level of detail for ship models.

since im not at all familiar with it, what are LOD’s and how do i make them work.

also are they necessary for a functioning and smooth mod?

Timmy51m

Grab a copy of the latest UTF editor and open a vanilla ship model, use the model viewer and you will see the different meshes. Basically just lower poly meshes that are used when a model is further away in game and you can’t notice the detail anyway.

Open shiparch.ini and you will see the LOD distances for each ship entry. Each entry triggers a different LOD in the model. You’ll work it out easy enough.

J.Walker

LOD’s is your model in several polygon counts.

example:

LOD-0 5000 poly’s
LOD-1 3000 poly’s
LOD-2 1500 poly’s
LOD-3 500 poly’s

amongst the things it is used for:

rendering quality (usually used for settings like Model Quality or detail levels)
the farther you are from the the object the lower the polygon lod that is used.

Hidamari

Oh i see… does that mean the same model needs to be re-done 5 times? O.O

I have a model that is 6000 polys, how many LOD’s does this need? 4 like J.Walker said?

so… uh, right… thats going to add a lot of time to this… lol

my fighters are only <1000 polys, do they still need so many LOD’s ?

Timmy51m

Unless you have a very old computer or have a low end system, I wouldn’t even worry about it. Even my old win xp machine, core2duo e6850, 4gig ram with an nvidia 260gtx never had any problems running freelancer full of single mesh models from X3, Nexus etc. Newer systems just laugh at the game it’s so old.

Gisteron

my single core with 1.86 GHz and an intel mobile graphics accelerator managed to run FL fluently even with one model of ~180000 polygons… however no other software besides Freelancer then, and way less fluent in combat. So, LOD’s are mostly an indicator of the modder’s knowledge and skill and the least clients of yours may actually need well balanced models.

J.Walker

at 1K polygons i would not worry about LOD. on average my models are between 2500 ~ 20000 and for Freelancer i have never worried about LOD.

Despite Freelancers failings i find it does a pretty good job at rendering higher poly models efficiently.

Hidamari

thanks everyone, i appreciate you helping my clarity on this process again.

Freestalker.fr

To make LODs you can use the decimate function of Blender, it’s realy easy to do.

Hidamari

whats that? decimate? sound a bit extreme

what does it do?

rik_starkiller

This is from the Blender website…

The Decimate modifier allows you to reduce the vertex/face count of a mesh with minimal shape changes. This is not applicable to meshes which have been created by modeling carefully and economically, where all vertices and faces are necessary to correctly define the shape, but if the mesh is the result of complex modeling, with proportional editing, successive refinements, possibly some conversions from SubSurfed to non-SubSurfed meshes, you might very well end up with meshes where lots of vertices are not really necessary.

You can also achieve a similar effect in 3ds max by using the Optimise modifier.

Cheers,
Rik

Gisteron

keep in mind, you may have to make custom UV maps for all the LOD models

J.Walker

When i do LOD levels i do manual reductions mainly because every reduction tool i have ever used has been, well utter crapola.

doing it manually has it’s drawbacks though, takes more time. however it gives me complete control over the quality of the LOD levels and uv map corrections that are simple as pie to adjust along the way.