Anim8or Community

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Ian Ross has just released a book on Anim8or. It's perect for a beginner and a good reference for experienced users. It contains detailed chapters on every aspect, with many examples. Get your own copy here: "Anim8or Tutorial Book"

Author Topic: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?  (Read 8257 times)

Nellucnaiv

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 88
    • View Profile
Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« on: July 08, 2018, 12:48:49 pm »
Hi again all,
I seem to ask a lot of questions but I want to learn all I can from all who are willing to share. When creating scenes containing elements with lots of detail, I am aware of the need to keep the poly count as low as possible without jeopardising visual quality. I am currently busy on a project requiring lots of bush and foliage. Some will never be viewed up close but I've tried about 6 different methods of creating a reasonable looking low poly bush but it looks very unrealistic. To get a simple bush looking really realistic one would need in the region of 30 000 points which is undesirable. I'm aiming at 2000 to 5000 tops.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to achieve this?
I thank you all in advance for any advice or methods you can suggest!
Thank you kindly,
Ian
Logged

NickE

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 167
    • View Profile
Re: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2018, 02:07:56 pm »
Depending on how your scene will interact with the added foliage, you could try billboarding.  This is a technique where you map a 2D image of the foliage as a texture, transparancy map, and bump map to a plane.  You can direct the plane to always be perpendicular to the camera so that the 2D nature of the plane is not noticable.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/54871/what-is-billboarding-and-can-should-it-be-used-in-3d-games-to-create-special-ef
Logged

Nellucnaiv

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 88
    • View Profile
Re: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2018, 02:44:59 pm »
Hi Nick,
Thanks a lot for that. I'll give it a go. I have done transparencies on a plane before for other things but never used a bump map with them. Looking forward to having a go at this.

Thanks again and thanks for the link!
All the best,
Ian
Logged

Lineberger

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 1
    • View Profile
Re: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« Reply #3 on: September 19, 2018, 08:07:35 am »
Quote from: Nellucnaiv on July 08, 2018, 02:44:59 pm
Hi Nick,
Thanks a lot for that. I'll give Leanbean a go. I have done transparencies on a plane before for other things but never used a bump map with them. Looking forward to having a go at this.

Thanks again and thanks for the link!
All the best,
Ian

Does billboarding look good on the screen? It sounds clunky, but I may be wrong.
« Last Edit: May 16, 2022, 05:06:31 am by Lineberger »
Logged

Steve

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2124
    • View Profile
Re: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« Reply #4 on: September 19, 2018, 09:07:46 am »
Billboarding can look very good, depending on where you use it. For something like trees in the background or nor too close to the camera, it's quite good and is very low polygon. If you move the camera a lot then it begins to break down the closer the bilboards are to the camera. It's eaasy to try and if you don't like the results you can always use more complex models.
Logged

Nellucnaiv

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 88
    • View Profile
Re: Me again! About low poly highly detailed objects?
« Reply #5 on: November 16, 2018, 05:24:27 am »
A little late but thank you Steve! The billboards have been a great solution.
Logged