What are the options and best practices for PV3D inspired modeling.

Question

The studio I work at is currently developing the Tony Hawk XI website and I am responsible for the flash/AS3 development. As part of the pitch, I entered an augmented reality skateboard example to be shown which impressed the client very much.

After a few weeks of getting stronger with Papervision3D, and getting to know the Flar Toolkit, I have successfully imported md2 and dae files that load and interact with my custom marker.

Now it has come time to develop some of my own models; I will be using 3DSMAX. I want to know what the limitations are on things like poly-count, character rigging and animation, texturing, tricks for exporting and creating the proper format file and any other bits of information that may save me some serious headaches down the road.

Currently I have a Quake2 MD2 model, Ernie, pulled inside of a FlarToolkit demo here.

This is very low-poly and I was wondering how many polys could I expect to get away with being that today's machines are so much faster;

Brian Hodge
blog.hodgedev.com hodgedev.com

Answer 1

I've heard that 2000 polys is about the threshold for good performance. In practice though, its been hit or miss and a lot of things can have an impact. So far I've run into perfomance hits when using animated movieclip materials, animated materials with an alpha chanel and precise materieals.

Having to clip objects seems to be a double edged sword. In some cases, it will increase performance by a good deal, and in others (seems to be primarily when there are alot of polys on the edge of the viewport) it'll drop the framerate by a good 10-15 fps. So, I'd say the view you setup is something to think about as well.

For example, we have a model of an interior of a store with some shelves and products and customers walking around. In total we have just under 600 triangles (according to the StatsView, which you should check out if you haven't yet: org.papervision3d.view.stats.StatsView). On my computer, which is a new computer with a quad core it runs at a steady 30fps (which is where we want it), but on an old Dell XPS (Pentium 4) it runs between 20 and 30fps depending on what objects are being clipped, etc.

We try to reduce the poly count and texture creatively to fix as many of the performance issues as possible. Unfortunatley our minimum specs are really low, so we need to do alot to get it to run well.

Edit: Another thing we're doing is swapping out less detailed models for higher detailed ones when zoomed in. If you aren't zooming at all, than this probably won't help.

Hope that helps a bit.