With the huge range of scale in Star Citizen how do you keep your textures from being recognizable patterns at a distance?asked by Amontillado
TL;DRThey hide repeating patterns by blending multiple textures and using level-of-detail geometry, and say design choices like changing materials help, but tiled capital ships will eventually look tiled at distance.
This has been a hot topic lately. While we have ways to make things not recognizable at distances we do a lot of blending between multiple textures so at a distance you can't really tell, It's like similar approaches to what games have been using for terran for years. The big challenge is working on the capital ships, the further you get away the harder it is to keep the scale and detail looking correct.
A lot of it isn't even technical, it's just design, at this distance you know starcitizen looks like a repeating tile so when you start reaching that range you probably want to break up the ship in some sort of design so it changes material so something distracts it and being clever because you know your limitations. You know it is going to eventually look like it is tiled, there is just no way around it if you are tiling entire ships.
Exactly it is all about being clever, and you LOD to so geometry up close looks different from far away.
What does LOD stand for?
Level of Detail.
Okay.
You thought I was going to say Distance.
No, I thought it was level of display.
Did you really think it was level of display?
No-one ever told me. Everyone just calls them LODs.Disco Lando: Really? Cause I"m sitting over here and he said LOD, and you were like 'wonder what that is' And I was like, Level of Detail, it just makes sense to me.
Well it didn't make sense to me. I don't do LOD's. That's not my job! Well, it kind of is now, but. We'll see. Deal with that later.
I know what your next task is.
Concepting?
LOD's that are a recognizable pattern at a distance.