Visible distance
by Kevin Bamonte · in Torque Game Engine · 08/21/2008 (10:49 am) · 4 replies
Hello all,
i am creating a mission that has lots of trees on a hill a small distance away - when you are furthest away they look like a group of sticks with hardly any branches showing and then they start to look better as you get closer (tree limbs start appearing and the trees look fuller etc) until you get to a point where they look like trees
what is actually going on here in the engine ? why wouldn't the trees look the same from the furthest distance to the closest (as they would in real life) ?
i've played with the visible distance setting and safely upped it to 3000 but anything over that and torque bombs out ...
any suggestions are appreciated - thanks in advance
kevin
i am creating a mission that has lots of trees on a hill a small distance away - when you are furthest away they look like a group of sticks with hardly any branches showing and then they start to look better as you get closer (tree limbs start appearing and the trees look fuller etc) until you get to a point where they look like trees
what is actually going on here in the engine ? why wouldn't the trees look the same from the furthest distance to the closest (as they would in real life) ?
i've played with the visible distance setting and safely upped it to 3000 but anything over that and torque bombs out ...
any suggestions are appreciated - thanks in advance
kevin
#2
edit: Bill was quicker to respond, more concise, and even included a link.
08/21/2008 (11:46 am)
It's because of the LOD embedded in the model itself. Level Of Detail. It's a means of conserving overhead and processing to keep from rendering a 1000 polygon tree when it's only 2 pixels high while in the distance. You would instead render a detail level that was maybe 20 polygons or less when it's that size on the screen. As you move closer to the tree it begins to take up more screen space which triggers the LOD change to a more complex model.edit: Bill was quicker to respond, more concise, and even included a link.
#3
1. You should have direct control of the LOD for a model via script.
2. You can redo the trees in question to have a better looking LOD and re-export them to dts.
08/21/2008 (12:05 pm)
Kevin you have 2 options to make it look better.1. You should have direct control of the LOD for a model via script.
2. You can redo the trees in question to have a better looking LOD and re-export them to dts.
Torque Owner Bill Vee
DayOfWar Studios
Basically the further away from a 3D object you get a lower poly-count model is used to display it.