How bad can it be?

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

                <stands with hands on hips...>

I'm of two minds. <Oh! Don't bring me into this!> Hush.

My poly-count is sky-rocketing and I'm really thinking hard about trade-offs...

So, I have the rough of Sylvi'a's Crown of Flowers (that will turn into the other aspects (thorn/fruit/leaves), like the gaian herself, with a texture change in the seasonal hak). Not bad.

But the rigid, cutting-edge petals bug me.  (for reference, her head is about 1m in dia... crown is in porportion)

What kind of a performance hit am I looking at to make them dangly? I'm probably going to have 3K vertexes, vertexi, er, points by the time I'm done, and some of the vines and things will be dangly, too.

Anyone have any experience comparing large models with/with little/without dangly mesh?

<...straddling a fence>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Rolo Kipp, 04 septembre 2011 - 08:03 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               Dangly mesh is very expensive in terms of processing load.  Every vertice on a given object that has dangly assigned is processed individually every heart beat to see if it should move.  It doesn't matter if you have the vertice set to no movement either, as the engine sees the whole object as dangly, so it must process every vertice to see what moves each HB.  Movement is caused by the environment IE wind, AND by motion of the creature so the engine has to check each vert and "handle" it individually.

It CAN be done, and HAS been done on a large number of creatures, but typically when it has been done, other constraints are placed to reduce total poly count on the creature as well OR to require a builder to limit the number of instances of said creature etc...

Anyway, you can do it, just be stringent in how many individual objects (by objects, I mean individual meshes) have dangly assigned, AND how many individual vertices are on each of those objects.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <nods thoughtfully...>

Thank you.
That is the stuff I wanted to hear.  Not unexpected, but I'd much rather go into it knowing something about what to expect.

I've separated out the flowers from the crown from the head... And I figure it's a lot easier to delete the danglymesh modifier than to set everything up, so I'll try it out with a) all the goodies swaying just the fronds & vines (some of which is hair - again, separate from head) swaying and c) nothing dangly.

She's both unique and the only non-party creature in a small area...
though I would like a few sprites...
<sigh>

Well, we'll see.

<...or, perhaps, off>