FMP Week 17 - Plugins, engine problems and LOD's

   These past few weeks have been pretty consistent texturing progress. one of the things I moved onto this week and originally had no idea how to make, was the chain link fence. I knew It had to be a tillable, but I wasn't sure how to go about making the texture.
   Little did I know that there's a plugin for 3ds max that is purely for making wire fences such as this. It gives you a variety of parameters such as the size of the wire loops, how many twists occur etc. I keep getting told that by doing something in a more efficient way it isn't necessarily cheating. But I cant help but feel like I'm cutting a corner by using this. The alternative would have taken me quite a few hours and I would have had to do quite a lot of tweaking before reaching something I was happy with. Where as this whole process, of making the mesh and projection mapping, to lining up the texture sheet to be a tillable, followed by making the texture itself in engine. Took me all of about half an hour I think. Much more efficient than about 4+ hours of work for the same result.

Not bad for half an hour.

I worked with decals in engine this week too. Which aren't exactly practical, efficient or working properly. Initially I had the problem of them working fine-ish, in the light. But in the shadows they virtually disappear.

Standard decal.

Decal with emissive. 

This is obviously a huge improvement, but it only works for coloured decals. It wont work in dark areas where the light flickers, because it'll be illuminated all the time. And because of this, grime is out of the question due to these limitations. This is one of the things I'm constrained too by the engine version, but even if I used an up to date version, I believe they're still not 100% fixed.

LOD's are a useful way to reduce the draw on the engine if you're having trouble with the frame rate. So I intended to make multiple for each asset. The process of making them wasn't long at all really, and it made me realise I need to put more geometry into my assets in the future. Some of the assets I made didn't need an LOD, because they were as low as I could go without disturbing the smoothing groupings.  So a few of my assets don't have them, where as some have multiple. I had a feeling I could package the LOD's in with the original mesh. The same as you'd do with the collision. But when I tried to do that, they didn't combine. The alternative was to import them seperatly. Which doesn't take long at all really. Its just a bit annoying when the feature should work.

A selection of LOD's next to their respective meshes.

Last off I had a few random problems with a drop in FPS too. Completely unexplained. I didn't know if we'd reached some kind of limit on the engine, or if that was even a thing. So as a test I decided to remove Sharn's side of the wall in a copy of the engine. To see if anything would happen. Unfortunately nothing happened and it still dropped considerably. More on that next week.