High Performance Continuous LOD: A question to the GG Community
by Demolishun · in Torque 3D Professional · 01/18/2012 (6:42 pm) · 6 replies
A friend of mine who is a really smart algorithm expert discovered something about 10 years ago and has of yet done anything with the technology. He figured out how to create an object that generates a continuous LOD depending upon how many triangles you want out of the object. The LOD is all preprocessed ahead of time and requires almost no overhead to shift between LOD levels. It does require one additional variable to hold information about each vertex. It also remaps the UV on the fly so you only ever need the one UV map. It does this all very quickly.
Would anyone in the community be interested in this technology?
A few of possibilities we talked about:
1. Use it as an external program to automatically generate meshes at different LOD levels and the UV maps for each.
2. Rewrite the code in C++ and provide it as a tool inside the shape editor inside of T3D for generating the same thing as 1.
3. Insert it into the rendering pipeline inside of T3D.
One place it did not do well was terrain. It would make the terrain look like it was liquid. Now, it may be a useful visual effect for terrain, but not for LOD.
The code is currently written in Delphi.
Would anyone in the community be interested in this technology?
A few of possibilities we talked about:
1. Use it as an external program to automatically generate meshes at different LOD levels and the UV maps for each.
2. Rewrite the code in C++ and provide it as a tool inside the shape editor inside of T3D for generating the same thing as 1.
3. Insert it into the rendering pipeline inside of T3D.
One place it did not do well was terrain. It would make the terrain look like it was liquid. Now, it may be a useful visual effect for terrain, but not for LOD.
The code is currently written in Delphi.
About the author
I love programming, I love programming things that go click, whirr, boom. For organized T3D Links visit: http://demolishun.com/?page_id=67
#2
01/19/2012 (11:36 am)
I would think rewriting it in C++ would be a better advantage to using it in T3D and/or external utilities as Delphi has pretty much ran its course same as Visual Basic and it just isn't practical anymore, not that I'm saying those languages were practical back in the day either. This is coming from an ex-VB5/6 programmer. ;)
#3
I had not thought about it as a DLL. That is a possibility.
@Nathan,
I agree it would be better in C++ overall.
Just to help people understand what I am after. Is there interest in the technology from the community? Regardless of the form it is in.
01/19/2012 (1:35 pm)
@Richard,I had not thought about it as a DLL. That is a possibility.
@Nathan,
I agree it would be better in C++ overall.
Just to help people understand what I am after. Is there interest in the technology from the community? Regardless of the form it is in.
#4
01/19/2012 (2:39 pm)
Definitely would be interested.
#5
01/19/2012 (3:18 pm)
Okay, I will look into getting a demo video together in the short term. For the code itself it will be a few months as we are both engaged in other projects that are taking a considerable amount of time. 
#6
01/20/2012 (3:49 am)
I am very interested in it. 
Torque Owner Richard Ranft
Roostertail Games
Very cool stuff, though. We could stand a serious brush-up on the terrain system while we're at it, too....