![]() The key is to break out UVs where the geometry sharply differs from the continuity of the surface around it. These islands are keeping xNormal from casting seams along the edges of those areas. Just like our last tombstone mesh I broke out the damaged bits and strong surface changes into their own “UV Islands”. Just try and keep the number of materials on each mesh as low as possible :) If you have more than one material on heavily instanced assets you can see how this would start to adversely affect your frame rates. This means that if you have a metropolitan city full of instanced buildings each individual building is adding another draw call. One last thing worth mentioning is that even instanced meshes with the exact same materials will require separate draw calls. When you think about how many textures that is you might that’s a lot, but each of those calls is slowing down performance. The 600 series Nvidia cards can do roughly 600 draw calls per frame and that’s pretty good. A lot of engines will actually limit the number of materials you can put on a single mesh. A draw call is done for each material on a mesh every frame. Your video card can only do so many of these per rendered frame and keeping this low is going to have a big impact on performance. If textures are the new limiting factor then what you should be aware of is “ draw calls“. If you need a few more verts to make an edge look better just do it! Stripping down the polygons to an absolute minimum is going to cripple the ability of a normal/displacement map to affect the perceived detail of your asset. We are using lots of texture memory to affect and displace geometry. Texture maps represent modern geometry more than polygons do at levels of high frequency detail. “I spent a solid few months of optimizing polys, lightmap UV channels, collision meshs for everything in UT and the act of stripping 2million polys out of a level generally improved the FPS by 2 or 3 frames.” – Kevin Johnstone ( NULL.polycount /forum/showthread NULL.php?t=50588). We’ve gotten to the point on mid level hardware where poly count isn’t the limiting factor it used to be. Whether its triangles or quads less is not always better. ![]() A lot of people fret about poly count in-game design. And speaking of polygons I wanted to address a common misconception about them. Like most of the assets in the scene I’m trying to keep the poly count around 1K. If the objects look to crude then you need to turn up your dynamesh resolution before dragging to retopologize. They should be one sub tool, but you’re going to have to ctrl drag and empty marquee selection to have ZBrush retopologize your dynamesh subtool once more. Start by making sure both objects are dynameshes themselves and then use subtool master to merge all visible subtools. If you’ve never merged dynamesh objects before it’s actually quite simple. The book sculpted the same way, but I created the book within ZBrush as a separate subtool. With the tombstone here I was able to take a human skull I had modeled for a previous project and insert it into the top of the grave. Gone are the days of matching up verts and integrating meshes before they can be treated as a single surface. ( NULL.terrymatthes /wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gravesculptL NULL.jpg)ĭynamesh is your best friend in ZBrush while creating game assets! Maybe it’s because I started working with 3D before ZBrush was around, but I just love the ability to kit bash with ZBrush while staying largely ignorant of topology. Saving out the noise and other commonly used elements will also help me to keep things artistically cohesive throughout the production of the scene. I was able to use the noise profile that I saved from my last sculpt to break up the noise on this one as well. After I have the basic shape it’s time to save a copy and start sculpting wear and tear. With hard objects like this I like to start by smashing together basic geometric shapes with Dynamesh. Just like the last mesh I started in ZBrush my sculpting the general shape. This would let me cut the number of tombstones that needed to be created in half. From that point on I decided that all the tombstones were going to have a different design on each side. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t sculpting more assets than I needed to make the scene look full. ![]() ![]() As I was breaking down the scene I was trying to think of ways I could maximize my work time. I have sculpted another since my last WIP and thought I would share it. I’m creating a cemetery scene so you can imagine that I’m going to need some tombstones. ![]()
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