Blender LOD

Hey guys,
Im having some huge issues with creating a high quality sculpt at any zoom level. I am trying to create a sculpt that will retain its basic shape when zoomed out. Im familiar on how Second Life lowers the level of detail the further away your camera is from the sculpt and Ive even made a cube to where it holds its shape on all the multires levels accepted by SL, so it looks good no matter what zoom you are from the object, but when I take that cube and edit it to the object that I want, and then zoom out, it just goes back to the old ugly blob we all love to hate. There is nothing more horrible to see an awesome sculpt up close and zoom away to see the horror of your design..

So I was hoping on a better explanation of how to avoid this issue, or steps to make a sculpt that will hold its shape much better through the different levels of detail.

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated,

Thanks again everyone!

When i model my sculpts, i typically start with a reduced mesh of 8*8 faces. This corresponds to the lowest LOD level in world (technically there is an even lower layer of 6*6 faces, but that is usually irrelevant in practice). After i have created the low poly version of my sculpt, i double the mesh-points to get 16*16 faces and thus i jump to the next LOD level. There i refine my model. Finally i double again to get 32*32 faces and create the final model.

With blender and the Domino Marama Scripts you get this workflow without effort. In "multires" mode you can work on all LOD levels and switch forth and back (there are some issues with that, but in principle it works well)

But there is an even better way to go. That is called "Subsurf" and it is also supported with blender and Domino's scripts. In subsurf mode you get an 8*8 faces control mesh, which you can manipulate. The control mesh however does control a higher poly mesh of 32*32 faces. Now when yo modify the control mesh, the target mesh is modified in such a way, that LOD constraints apply. Thus in this mode you can just model your sculpt and you can be sure, that the final result just works fine in SL regarding LOD.

If you still need more fine tuning, you always can go into a mode, where you have full control over each single mesh point ( aka "apply multires or subsurf" ). But then it is again up to you to take care about LOD

Probably you know that already but for completeness: You can get a quick jump into the tool if you are working in windows. The machinimatrix provides a free download of a fully customized blender (the JASS-distribution) containing everything you need to go plus a set of beginners video tutorials. see


http://blog.machinimatrix.org/jass
http://blog.machinimatrix.org/blender-tutorials


have fun
Gaia