Hey! I´m Ancient Mole, the creator of the Crystal Fortress.
I´ve been reading along and would like to give you guys some insight into my work and thought process while creating it.
The whole Crystal Fortress Premium gift is made out of these 13 crystal clusters.
Each of those has exactly 108 Polygons and 3 Land Impact with the following LOD steps seen here:
I have used those to build the first version of the Crystal Fortress.
I didn't save that version, so here is a simplified recreation of it using one of the clusters.
The Crystal Fortress has 9984 Polygons all together, so around 92 of those crystal clusters.
As you see I ended up with 394 Land Impact which is way too much.
Just for a test I tried some lower LOD numbers seen here:
Each piece now now 2LI which results in 249LI and is still too much.
I didn't take any pictures for this one but I also tried the following LOD steps: 108,28,9 and 2 with the LI per cluster being 1 now.
Eureka! We got the Crystal Fortress down to 118 LI! Lets look at it with the LOD Factor of 1 :
Little video of the results
This is not what I was looking for I fear and that would not pass QA.
So this is what I ended up doing to have the Crystal Fortress have 163 Land Impact while not collapsing at even LOD Factor 1.
I turned all of the Crystal Fortress into a single object which I then uploaded without any extra custom LOD´s.
This might be frowned upon in some cases but in this one, it allows us to have a decent Land Impact as well as it being resistant to collapsing.
Since the Avatar is basically located inside of the object it stays in shape even on the lowest settings.
That of course is only ok because the Crystal Fortress has only 9984 Polygons which are pretty easy to handle for your system.
Your basic avatar is already 7200 Polygons and that is being naked
I´d love to give you guys some more information if you got questions about how I or my Mole family do things!
Byesers for now