Quality settings for populations

Started by ProjectX, January 21, 2007, 08:30:17 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

ProjectX

What is the difference between the quality settings for populations (you know - the drop-down bar that says, normal, low, high and very high) it obviously takes a lot longer to render something set to very high than it does to normal, so what is the actualy difference to the render?

§ardine

Quote from: FrankB on December 13, 2006, 06:51:59 PM


  • Render Quality: Allows for specifying the render quality of populated objects. For  objects in the immediate foreground, a higher quality setting is desirable, but will require longer render times. For far away populations, less detail is required. Hence, lower detail settings may do just fine.


This doesn't give too much more info, but maybe enough to help :)

MeltingIce

Yea, basically the quality setting mass adjusts the quality with which each object in the population is going to be rendered.  So if you are doing an extremely close up render of a bunch of objects in a population you will want the quality high.  If you are doing a far away shot of a population, lower the quality to decrease what would be an unnecessarily long render time.

MeltingIce Network | Wii Number: 3881 9574 8304 0277

3DGuy

Would be nice if there was some LOD option like in 3D games. Where you can tell the renderer after what distance the quality may step down a notch.

Will

The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Dark Fire

Quote from: 3DGuy on January 21, 2007, 02:07:29 PM
Would be nice if there was some LOD option like in 3D games. Where you can tell the renderer after what distance the quality may step down a notch.
Yes, I was wondering about that because I often have a large population but put the camera close to several objects in that population. I then have to waste time rendering the entire population with high detail.

neon22

Quote from: Dark Fire on January 21, 2007, 03:28:14 PM
Quote from: 3DGuy on January 21, 2007, 02:07:29 PM
Would be nice if there was some LOD option like in 3D games. Where you can tell the renderer after what distance the quality may step down a notch.
Yes, I was wondering about that because I often have a large population but put the camera close to several objects in that population. I then have to waste time rendering the entire population with high detail.

Make two populations (or more) for different distances

3DGuy

And then you move the camera and you have to move your populations you so painstakingly made. LOD is far easier.

Oshyan

The population detail options should be fairly self-explanatory, really. I would suggest rendering with the default and only increasing it if you feel detail is somehow lacking. I've also actually found that there are occasionally missing bits in background objects with lower quality settings that are fixed when increasing quality, whereas foreground objects seem less affected. I believe this is because foreground objects are favored for LoD.

LoD is already done to a certain degree - background populations render quite fast in general. Being able to specify different detail levels for LoD distances might be useful though.

- Oshyan

Cyber-Angel

Question, are instances in TG2 its name for what is more commonly known as billboards or is this some thing different? As I'd like to contribute to this topic but need more information.

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel

Oshyan

Billboards are one way to reduce render time with instances but they are not currently implemented in TG2.

- Oshyan