Confused about LOD & VWD (again)

[SACarrow]

Trying to understand VWD and distantLOD as it applies to FishIsland; below are two screens where I hover over the island at different altitudes. The shack is at the top of each screen. In one the shack can be seen as VWD, while in the other it's in normal mode. The problem is that the VWD one (no visible thatch) is wrong; there should be thatch on the _far NIF I built as well as no visible framework, just walls. If that is not recognized, that I thought nothing would be visible. I even tried regenning the dLOD, but no joy. I've included basic & far NIFs of one side of the shack so it can be seen that the "far" NIF in the screen is actually the basic one. In my searches, all the _fars I've found should have thatch.

Very confused,
Steve

[Phitt]

Not sure I understand the problem completely. You have a _far nif for the shack that looks like the regular shack (with maybe a few polys less). The _far nif gets displayed like it should, but the thatch is missing? If so the problem might be that transparencies don't work on VWD objects as far as I know (except for speedtree billboards). Since the thatch most likely has transparency on the edges maybe the game engine just doesn't display that part (or renders it completely invisble). Try without alpha property.

[SACarrow]

Sorry, my bad; I knew posting at 0230 local wasn't bright.

The problem is that the game appears to use the base NIF as the _far NIF. A tell here is that cross-poles can be seen in the "far" shot as light horizontal lines, while the actual _far model does not have those poles.

Steve

[SACarrow]

For a closer view, here is a blow-up of the shack itself. The reason the framework could be seen at all is that when I made these models, I didn't know how to make different Havok materials coexist in the same NIF. Therefore the thatch roof is a different mesh. The _far NIF, OTOH, has the roof incorporated; that's how I even noticed this in the first place. Note the framework; that's another tell: no framework in the _far NIF.

Steve

[Phitt]

Are you sure it's the _far nif you're actually seeing? Could be that the roof fades out due to object slider settings before the rest of the shack does (since it's a different mesh) and that's why you see the poles. You seem to hover directly above the shack, I wonder how you are supposed to see VWD objects this way? No matter how high above you are, you are still in the 5x5 cells loaded area of active cells. The textures don't look very LOD to me either (no LOD shader, far too high resolution - on your close up you can even see the different stones on the landscape texture around the shack). You need to move along the x or y axis to see the LOD, the z axis doesn't matter.

Yours Sherlock Phitt.

EDIT: The amount of VWD objects impacts performance a lot by the way, I tested that. The polycount doesn't matter that much, but it makes a huge difference wether you have only 100 (nearly no impact) or 1000 (huge FPS drop) VWD objects visible. If you really have to make a shack VWD I suggest you use only one _far nif for the whole shack.

[SACarrow]

That could be it, guess (the Z-axis thing). What threw me off is that th tree on the island is in VWD (billboard) mode, but trees are handled so differently in OB, they cannot be used for comparison. I guess.

Steve