Sculpty help please -distance

I'm sure this has been covered but I couldn't find the information so throw me a bone please.

I have been working on some sculptures and the imports look nice upon close inspection but if I move even a few meters away from them they turn to mush. After visiting Greenies and other places I see that this problem can be overcome except I have no idea how.

Help please?

hai!,

You should always create your object at the medium detail level of 16x16 and then when you're happy with the shape, subdivide it to add the upper detail level of 32x32.

The uppermost detail level should only ever be used to smoothen the object if necessary and should never be used to add significant structure.

So basically, try to think of sculpties as being 16x16 objects.

Does your modeling program support subdivision surfaces?

Ok 2k thanks

I have been doing this all very backwards for some reason. I think the idea of modeling something and then chopping it up again for import into the engine is what got me off track and I decided to use too high of counts. (using multiple engines I get so confused sometimes and I should probably sleep more)

It's good to know about that effect, back to the drawing board.

In addition to 2K's good advice, don't be afraid to "reinforce" vertices by overlapping them. As your point of view gets further from a sculpty, it's poly count gets cut in half, and then in half again. If you've got two or three vertices occupying the same space, at least one will remain in place when the others are culled.

It's a bit of a trade-off. When you overlap vertices, you get less room for fine detail, but more stability. The environment a particular sculpty is meant for can determine whether stability or detail is the more important factor. If the sculpty is going to be outdoors, then stability is paramount. But if it's going to be in a small room, where no one will ever see it from far enough away for LOD culling to have any effect, then you can do less overlapping, for more detail. Make sense?

LL should probably help reinforce this fact or create a workaround for it. Good to know either way.

Also worth noting that the LOD steps are determined by the ratio of the distance and the size of the bounding box. So a sculpty that is 5x5m inside a bounding box of 10x10m will break down further away than one that looks the same size but is in a 5x5 bounding box. The payoff is that you also loose half the vertex positioning resolution, and you have to make them phantom to stop bumping into nothing.

Would be nice if LL would just let us define our own sculpty LODs within a ratio rather than just force it on us with a single standard. Every sculpt is going to be different. Some shapes just aren't going to come through at 16x16 structurally and there's no way around it.

We just have finished a video tutorial about LOD (but not yet officially released). We use blender as demo program, but the content is probably still valuable for other programs.
The official release will most probably be on wednesday (04-june-200
But if you want to get a peak preview of the video, send an IM to "Hussayn Salomon" or me in world. We will provide the URL to the .wmv video (60 MByte), but we kindly request heavy feedback for quality assurance

we have released the video about LOD. You can find it
at http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod/

You also have to factor that the greenies use huge prims. Anything rendered like a sculpty, or even particels, whatever. Always use the distance to draw type of render. So the larger the prim,, the better. And I know what you are talking about, the greenies have some amazing sculpties in their sims. But most are some 30-40m tall. So they will render at a distance without problems.