Is it possible to use less bones per skeleton for, let's say, LOD's?

[killkhergit]

As the title says...

*Removed typo*

 

[killkhergit]

*eary silence*

anybody there?

 

[octoburn]

If you mean rigging a lod mesh to only certain bones, then yes. You'd get some funky results, but yes.

If you mean a completely new skeleton for lods, not gonna happen. a.) We can't have new skeletons, yet. b.) Even if you could, it would never work correctly. Each skin in the skins file has a specific skeleton defined to it. So even if you had it rigged to another skeleton, it would still assign it to the skeleton which is defined in the skins file.

Of course, someone a lot smarter than me could know a workaround, but that's my take on it.

EDIT: what would be the benefit of that anyways? I don't think less skeleton bones would help the games performance, as far as I know.

 

[jik]

The question (and the reason for asking) needs to be more clear.

Right now the game uses only 2 "skeletons", one for horses, one for humans.  There would be no reason to change the skeleton of an LOD model.  You are not saving any workload (from what I know).  For example, look at some of the LOD3 and LOD4 models.  They are missing legs, and with LOD4 the arms.  Still uses the same skeleton, but no vertices are painted to the bones for the arms and legs, since they are not there.

If you are looking at making new LOD models for ones that don't exist, you can pretty much use any LOD model (of say armor) for any full detail model (armor).  There are issues with differences, but I have foind that there are basically 3 types.  Short coat (just past the waste), medium coat (just past the crotch) and long (to about the knees).  I basically took these 3 LOD1 types from armors_b or c.  This was becuase some of my armor types I am using are the old style with only LOD2.  Since I am doing some tableau stuff, I need the other levels so I don't kill the GPU.

 

[Soil]

Well, I could imagine that less nodes/bones in a skeleton would take less render power.

 

[jik]

if you have to do that for your LODs you have other issues...

 

[MartinF]

the benifit would obviously be that if there are no bones to move.. there's nothing to render either. However, since jik pointed out that some of the LoD models don't have arms/legs, that would pretty much accomplish the same thing. It's just a different way of approaching it.

rendering the movement of a skeleton piece isn't going to take much processing power, it's rendering the polies and the texture on top of them with shaders and speculars and what not that causes the overhead.

 

[killkhergit]

the benifit would obviously be that if there are no bones to move.. there's nothing to render either. However, since jik pointed out that some of the LoD models don't have arms/legs, that would pretty much accomplish the same thing. It's just a different way of approaching it.

rendering the movement of a skeleton piece isn't going to take much processing power, it's rendering the polies and the texture on top of them with shaders and speculars and what not that causes the overhead.

Have tried to extract the bones from some LOD meshes and rig armors with them: They also have all the bones in them. When I remove one of them, the game crashes.

So:

--- Not possible ---