LOD is nightmarish with Maya
by Jeff Murray · in Artist Corner · 08/24/2006 (11:15 am) · 2 replies
Hi all!
So we're having an absolute nightmare trying to get different levels of LOD to work out of Maya.
First attempt gave us models which had the distance/size levels messed up. 128 certainly wasn't 128 pixels, as the player was right in-front of the camera and it was showing the wrong LOD.
Second attempt gave even stranger results ... this time, the LOD appeared to work correctly (albeit with higher values than we expected) only the player had two models on top of each other.
Well, trawling through the documentation on this it looks like (once again) you're fine if you use Max but Maya isn't covered. Since LOD is one of the engine's selling points I would have expected it to feature fairly high on the 'making it easier for people to do this stuff' list? Anyhoo I won't complain ... we have a problem and we need to solve it before my 3d artist explodes.
Has anyone got a tutorial, guide or idea on how to do this stuff without going insane? Anyone had problems like this with duplicate characters or something?
Thanks ... much appreciated :)
So we're having an absolute nightmare trying to get different levels of LOD to work out of Maya.
First attempt gave us models which had the distance/size levels messed up. 128 certainly wasn't 128 pixels, as the player was right in-front of the camera and it was showing the wrong LOD.
Second attempt gave even stranger results ... this time, the LOD appeared to work correctly (albeit with higher values than we expected) only the player had two models on top of each other.
Well, trawling through the documentation on this it looks like (once again) you're fine if you use Max but Maya isn't covered. Since LOD is one of the engine's selling points I would have expected it to feature fairly high on the 'making it easier for people to do this stuff' list? Anyhoo I won't complain ... we have a problem and we need to solve it before my 3d artist explodes.
Has anyone got a tutorial, guide or idea on how to do this stuff without going insane? Anyone had problems like this with duplicate characters or something?
Thanks ... much appreciated :)
Torque Owner Jeff Murray
Default Studio Name
Just for the record ... you have to set the visible of your main model to 0 (in the plugin, rendering options) before exporting otherwise it shows both the main (full detail) model as well as the LOD specific ones. Doh.
If only there were some good docs on modelling and exporting from Maya it would have saved two days of insanity!!!! Ah well ... onward and upward!!