Spiky spiny sculpties?

I've had a go at this and the easy way gets ruined by the LOD cull. i.e. from a few feet a spiny sphere just looks like a sphere as the vertices at the spine apex get culled first

Any tips?

LOD is inescapable
all i can tell you to do is use a 128x128 mesh size instead of 64x64
that way the sculpty will look smaller but will also be somewhat unaffected by LOD

What do you mean, Almia? All sculpties have the same mesh, a grid of 32x32 quads. There's no way to make one have 64x64 or 128x128 quads. Did you mean something else? If so, what?

This reminds me of Domino's helpful post: /8/48/278079/1.html#post2119354

Sculpted prim LOD generally takes away detail by removing every other row, neatly dividing the vertex count by two. What you'd need to do for spikes, thus, is go by a pattern that's very attentive to the pattern of removal, so that at least some spikes remain. If you came up with a mesh pattern that creates a spike every 3 vertices, or every [insert something other than a power of two], a spiky ball shouldn't resemble a sphere until maybe the very lowest, 6×6 level of detail (yes, that one's an exception, simply in that it's not a power of 2).

+Interesting note about mesh size: in the upcoming viewer, you will be able to get different mesh sizes, e.g. 16×64, 8×128, depending on the proportions of the sculpt map you upload. This WILL retroactively change sculpties that were uploaded at non-square dimensions, but it's all a client-side effect, so keep these complications in mind.

thanks al -- i'll check out the lod docs and that demo in more detail and let you know my results. i did manage to improve things slightly by placing 4 vertices per "point" but it's still um.... crap! LOL

/esc

Maybe the machinimatrix tutorials about LOD and "the arch example" can help too? http://blog.machinimatrix.org/video-tutorialsthey are made for blender, but i think, many of the concepts shown there apply in general to sculpties...

One remark concerning the "4 vertices per point" technique It works good as long as you are not going to make a texture for your sculpty. In general it seams much better to use a program, that lets you take LOD into account during building so you can get out the maximum possible quality regarding shape AND textures.

10 points to me for messing with your head.
lol
i was a bit sleepy when i wrote that.
so i got tons wrong in it.
just ignore it
lol

you actually can learn wich vertexes are skipped first in LOD. this way spikes can stay spikey a little longer.

All good feedback -- thanks everyone -- however despite a few hours of reading/experiment i've come to the conclusion that there is currently no way to get an acceptable result. I'll wait another couple of functional iterations/revolutions before trying this again. Meantime, prim spikes rule!

/esc