Do you do your LODs manually, or are they computer generated?
TL;DROn weapons the first LOD is usually generated automatically and the rest are made by hand; they are exploring Houdini automation, but one speaker is skeptical it will beat human artists soon.
It depends on what the asset is. More organic assets you can get with automation. On weapons, because they're so dense, doing them by hand is quite challenging. So we tend to do, I think, the first LOD automatically, and then after that, we do it manually. Is that right?
Yeah, that's how I tend to do it, because it still has enough detail to usually look really similar to the first one if you do it automatically, but after that the software doesn't know how to do it anymore. And this is the lowest version, where it's just the basic shapes, and it maybe doesn't look too good to you now, but at a distance of, let's say, 25 meters or 50 meters, you can't tell the difference.
With that LOD, it reminds me of Halo on the original Xbox.
Yeah, but you need to realize we don't have unique textures, so we can't make it have the texture on it, and we need to do everything with polygons. And that looks like Nintendo 64 style.
Yeah, I know we are exploring more automated workflows for LODs using Houdini. That's quite exciting. I'm a bit of an automated LOD skeptic. Personally, I think that human beings will be better at it than computers for the foreseeable future. Obviously, it takes a long time, and it can be automated, but the results often are not as good. So in some games, you have more obvious popping when you're moving away from an asset; you might see it deform wildly. We try our best to make our LODs unnoticeable.