I would like to know what you think about progressive mesh for lod and scene optimization... and how would you implement it (if you have lots of different levels of quality it might take too much memory? but at the same time if you have not enough, you might see the difference in the screen when you change to a lower or higher detail mesh... so what is a good approach... like how many levels of different quality etc...) and also would mixing progressive mesh with the famous billboard technique be better? Yann L PWNS Carmack

ok yea true... i didnt think about that for the billboard... thx for the info... so basicly you use billboard for objects that are the same even if the point of view change and you use progressive mesh for the other objects... that sounds good

Yann L PWNS Carmack

Look into impostors - these are billboards that are updated at runtime (by rendering to a texture), so they work for non-symetrical objects too.

As for progressive meshes and other alternatives: progressive meshes are a good form of continueous LOD, but to the best of my knowledge you have to update the vertex buffers almost every frame to do this. This is often expensive. The other option, mentioned by BlueChip, is to use a set of versions of the model (i.e. LODs), each of a lower resolution than the previous one. Then you select one of them based on distance. The impostor can be the last LOD. This has the advantage that you can keep your vertex buffers static, but the distadvantage is that you get popping. The popping can be reduced by carefully adjusting the distance at which the switch is made, or even calculating the maximum pixel-error between two adjacent LODs. Another option for reducing the popping is to alpha-blend between two adjacent LODs, but this may not always look very good... I think you could also interpolate between two LODs in a vertex shader, but I'm not sure how this is done.

Michael K.,
Co-designer and Graphics Programmer of "The Keepers"


We come in peace... surrender or die!

[edited by - technobot on June 19, 2003 9:22:37 AM]

quote:Original post by technobot
Look into impostors - these are billboards that are updated at runtime (by rendering to a texture), so they work for non-symetrical objects too.

Yea for sure but if you render again and again to texture wouldnt it just do the same as if you would render it to the screen, therefor no optimization? (my knowledge of the billboard technique is that when the object is far you render it to texture and save the texture and after you just need to display the texture every frame without rendering again to the texture)

Yann L PWNS Carmack

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quote:Original post by sross
Yea for sure but if you render again and again to texture wouldnt it just do the same as if you would render it to the screen, therefor no optimization?

You only update when the angle from which you''re looking at the object changes beyond some threshold (e.g. you were looking at it from the front, but now you''re looking at it from 15 degrees to its left). Once you''ve rendered your object, from some direction, you usually don''t need to update it for quite a while. And btw, the further the imposter is, the less frequently you will need to update it. Google for more info (should be plenty of it around).

Michael K.,
Co-designer and Graphics Programmer of "The Keepers"


We come in peace... surrender or die!

ah k now i see your point, it sounds good.

so to sum up, the best thing to do is to have around 9 level of quality for mesh depending on distance and then use the billboard technique and update the billboard only when the angle of view change of a certain amount. so i guess then that the best thing to do would be to render the lowest quality mesh to the billboard to save more time

ok now ill try to implement this in the engine im currently working on

thx for the help

Yann L PWNS Carmack