LODs and Skeletons

This figure is familiar from my earlier implementation of skeletal animations, if anyone was actually reading any of this so that they could actually be familiar with it. It's familiar to me, anyway.

The blue man group member has been washed to reveal an almost flesh-colored putty person. But there's a secret here. This isn't the same model as before, but one I've added a simplified LOD mesh to (in Blender 2.80, by the way, which seems a lot easier to use than 2.79, highly recommended). LOD scales are exaggerated, as usual, so you can see the switch as I move the camera around. The cool thing is that the skeletal animation attached to the original (base) model is automatically hooked up so that it works with other levels of detail. This might sound obvious, but, of course, it takes effort to make things that should work actually work for real.

Next, to check that it also works with shape keys (already implemented, but that just means the bugs are all in place).

Loads of LODs

Finally back to doing stuff. Another pile of work went in to doing this thing which should normally be invisible.

In the previous post I showed some automatic LOD generation, which is OK I guess, but doesn't do a great job all the time. For more control, you need to be able to import multiple versions of the same mesh which you have built by hand. The cylinder above is actually three separate objects which were created in Blender and imported from one file. The scales for switching between LODs were assigned automatically (based on the size of the faces in the objects), and are exaggerated here, again, for debugging.

So, that's working. Now just to check it works in concert with some other features, and then I can move on to... other things.