Somebody finally gets a mesh lowest LOD right.

[animats]

Tree at center is at highest LOD. This is clipped out of a long shot.

 

Tree at center is at lowest LOD. This is a transition from a full 3D model to a 2D impostor with just two flat surfaces.

Note slight blurring. That's the only visual difference. The impostor and 3D model line up properly.

Now this is level of detail done right. It's standard in video games, but not that common in SL.
If we could do the transition with a fade out of one and a fade in of the other, nobody would notice.

(This is from some Sharpview testing. Location is in Electra, in Heterocera.)

[arton Rotaru]

4 hours ago, animats said:

Tree at center is at highest LOD. This is clipped out of a long shot.

 

Tree at center is at lowest LOD. This is a transition from a full 3D model to a 2D impostor with just two flat surfaces.

Note slight blurring. That's the only visual difference. The impostor and 3D model line up properly.

Now this is level of detail done right. It's standard in video games, but not that common in SL.
If we could do the transition with a fade out of one and a fade in of the other, nobody would notice.

(This is from some Sharpview testing. Location is in Electra, in Heterocera.)

I find it somewhat offending that you always make it sound that all SL content creators are all kinda dumb people, when in fact there are plenty of us who do proper LODs since the introduction of mesh in 2011.

[Chic Aeon]

1 hour ago, arton Rotaru said:

I find it somewhat offending that you always make it sound that all SL content creators are all kinda dumb people, when in fact there are plenty of us who do proper LODs since the introduction of mesh in 2011.

Case in point these are from a decade ago and use the poster method.

 

The windows on this building from 2018 use that method also.  Needed because they are so complex. 

 

[Love Zhaoying]

2 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

I find it somewhat offending that you always make it sound that all SL content creators are all kinda dumb people, when in fact there are plenty of us who do proper LODs since the introduction of mesh in 2011.

I follow Animats and read almost all of his posts so I can learn from him.  Since I am used to his writing style,  I don't think he meant it that way (as if "nobody does it right").

More, "Here's an example where someone DID do a good job with LOD".

 

[arton Rotaru]

1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I follow Animats and read almost all of his posts so I can learn from him.  Since I am used to his writing style,  I don't think he meant it that way (as if "nobody does it right").

More, "Here's an example where someone DID do a good job with LOD".

 

I do read his posts as well, and I know where he is coming from with all this, that's out of question.

Anyhow, I've just expressed how this thread title is coming across to me.

[Love Zhaoying]

30 minutes ago, arton Rotaru said:

Anyhow, I've just expressed how this thread title is coming across to me.

RIght, "Finally" as in, "I've been waiting and searching, like Diogenes and his lamp, searching for an honest man".

I understand!

 

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, arton Rotaru said:

I find it somewhat offending that you always make it sound that all SL content creators are all kinda dumb people, when in fact there are plenty of us who do proper LODs since the introduction of mesh in 2011.

It's a bit hard to comment since the trees in the picture aren't here anymore but judging by the picture this looks similar to some of my 1 L$ budget trees, apart from the blur and a slightly different texture that is.

In any case, all my trees have better LOD than this and so do Alex Bader's and Teresa Matfield's just to mention two others. Animats knows this perfectly well so I'm not sure what he's trying to say here.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Animats knows this perfectly well so I'm not sure what he's trying to say here.

Sounds like the usual "LL should hire me to be Head Tech and let me remake the whole system as an AAA first person shooter game in Useless Engine 5" thing to be honest.

Finally, he found some trees that are not there any more, that do LODS the way HE thinks they should look, that most people wont buy because it looks bad.

 

/me shrugs

I'll just keep on using @ChinRey Oak trees.

[animats]

Ouch. I seem to have upset some people. Sorry.

My point here is that LOD transitions in SL tend not to be invisible. There's a lot of flickering in the distance in SL. I'm looking at how to fix that. Most game LOD systems do a cross-fade, rather than a cut, on an LOD switch. SL viewers do not cross-fade, but they could. I'm looking at whether it's worth the trouble to implement. The illusion only holds up if the different LODs match well.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Ouch. I seem to have upset some people. Sorry.

Well, it gave us an opportunity to point out that there are actually SL builders who take LOD and the other technical aspects of 3D modelling seriously.

 

1 hour ago, animats said:

My point here is that LOD transitions in SL tend not to be invisible. There's a lot of flickering in the distance in SL

As far as I know, the flickering is caused by the draw distance. It happens when an object is right at the limit.

 

1 hour ago, animats said:

I'm looking at how to fix that. Most game LOD systems do a cross-fade, rather than a cut, on an LOD switch. SL viewers do not cross-fade, but they could. I'm looking at whether it's worth the trouble to implement.

That would be really useful. I think I spend more time minimizing the "jumps" between the LOD models than I do reducing their tri counts. It's more about normals than geometry btw. You get those surfaces that suddenly brighten up or darken when the LOD models are swapped. It's dead easy for a model like the tree in Animat's pictures but very often it's a serious headache.

This is also arguably the biggest flaw with auto-generated LOD models; neither GLOD nor MeshOptimizer seem to take normal vectors into account at all. (Pro tip btw: Using custom normals to transfer normal data from the main model often often helps. Not always - sometimes it even makes matters worse - but often enough it's well worth adding the trick to your arsenal.)

I'm not sure if there's that much point if it's only implemented by one third party viewer though.

There are two more advanced solutions than cross-fading, tesselation and morphing with defined paths between the LOD levels. Those would require drastic changes both to the server and client software and even to the content creation work flow so they are not realistic options. I think there are a few AAA games that use tesselation but not many and as for morphing, I'm not sure if the technique has even been invented yet. Maybe I should patent it?

Edited December 23, 2023 by ChinRey

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, animats said:

Ouch. I seem to have upset some people. Sorry.

My point here is that LOD transitions in SL tend not to be invisible. There's a lot of flickering in the distance in SL. I'm looking at how to fix that. Most game LOD systems do a cross-fade, rather than a cut, on an LOD switch. SL viewers do not cross-fade, but they could. I'm looking at whether it's worth the trouble to implement. The illusion only holds up if the different LODs match well.

Yeah, you could have titled it "Cross fading LODs, worth the effort?" or something.

The creator in me is saying, yes please fade my LODs. However, cross fading instead of popping LODs requires to hold both models in vram for the time of the transition. Applying it to everything in SL wouldn't fly well probably. Which leaves the question to which group of objects applying it?
And yeah, fading between crappy LODs doesn't make much sense anyways,

However, you'll never know until you try! So I'd say go for it and we find out.

 

[Ron Khondji]

I might be missing something, or looking at the wrong tree, but that is a old linden tree from 2004.

 

[arton Rotaru]

4 hours ago, Ron Khondji said:

I might be missing something, or looking at the wrong tree, but that is a old linden tree from 2004.

Turned out this is not so much about trees, and the quality of LODs. It's more of a pitch for cross fading LODs. Since the last time I remember cross fading LODs has been discussed was during Mesh Beta in 2010, it may be time to re-evaluate the possibilities.

It's just that the execution of this pitch is rather out of the book how to not doing a pitch.

[Extrude Ragu]

On 12/23/2023 at 7:03 PM, animats said:

Ouch. I seem to have upset some people. Sorry.

My point here is that LOD transitions in SL tend not to be invisible. There's a lot of flickering in the distance in SL. I'm looking at how to fix that. Most game LOD systems do a cross-fade, rather than a cut, on an LOD switch. SL viewers do not cross-fade, but they could. I'm looking at whether it's worth the trouble to implement. The illusion only holds up if the different LODs match well.

Chicken and the egg situation. If there are crossfades, it's more worthwhile to be more careful with lods since the payoff will be greater than without crossfades.