Keeping It Low

Since we have a large amount of footage to render, we need to make sure that we keep our polygon counts and texture sizes appropriate for distance to the camera. In other words, if you aren't going to see it, then it doesn't need to be there. Se are going to be using lower detail assets in the background and higher detail assets in the foreground.

One trick we are using to do this is to bake out the higher polygon detail of some of our higher resolution assets onto our low polygon assets. We can get things looking pretty close to their higher polygon counter parts while keeping our render times to a minimum. Here's an example of the higher polygon asset next to the lower polygon asset with the detail baked into it:

As you can see we can get a lot of detail with very little actual geometry. Currently we are using Xnormal to generate the cavity maps (or ambient occlusion maps) and our normals maps. We also plan on using it to bake the textures from the higher resolution objects into our low resolution ones. So in the end we can spend very little time creating two versions of the same thing.

More to come.