Normal Mapped Mitten Hands

[Domarius]

I just realised something - oDDity left just after he developed the new mitten hand style, which uses normal maps to look like the last 3 fingers are seperate, when in the mesh, they're the one thing.

 

This was a saving of 800 polys per character.

 

Hopefully we can do this based on the screenshots he sent us. In the Pagan Female thread, he showed us a low poly shot with normal maps off to show what the hands actually look like on the mesh, and then he showed us the normal mapped version - looks like any other model he's done, pretty cool.

 

I'm hoping we can re-construct this simply using those screen shots. If its a case of replicating the geometry shown in the low poly un normal mapped shot, and then applying the normal map from the high poly version, we should be okay...

 

Any thoughts BlackThief?

[Dram]

It should be pretty simple imo. Also remember that we could save a few polys by making the fingers blocks with normals - unless oDD's models already do that.

[BlackThief]

it's definitely not very hard to model the mitten hands, but of course you won't be able to use the same texture.

Question is if we really want mitten hands on every character - I created full modelled hands for my legionary character with a lot less polygons oddity used. As far as I can tell oddity was quite lazy - he simply took the handmodel of the firstperson view and its texture and thus it was really detailed and highpoly...

[Domarius]

But look at the pics of the pagan female - the "normal mapped mitten hands" look like high detail ones, and they're less than any fully articulated hand could ever be, cause its just a thumb, pointer finger, and clump.

 

Are you able to do a poly count comparison between your legionary hand and the mitten hand of the pagan female?

 

We could make a desicion maybe, based on poly saving vs amount of work involved vs how noticibly bad a mitten hand might look at certain angles.

[Fingernail]

They still don't look as good, and it feels a bit cheap to be using techniques that engines like the Dark Engine used over 10 years ago...

[New Horizon]

The only difference is that the Dark Engine didn't have normal mapping. There really isn't a need to have such high detail in a characters hands, especially if the illusion can be passed off with a normal map.

[BlackThief]

however I can already hear the T3 fanboys whining - T3 had full modelled hands, teh darkmod sucks

[sparhawk]

Doesn't matter. The CPU power saved by polygons is available for AI and other stuff, which is what matters more. Especially if the result looks exactly the same.

[Fingernail]

but it doesn't look the same.

 

Alright, in the right light conditions, from far enough away, it looks similar, but a fully articulated hand still looks far better.

[BlackThief]

fingernail is right - it may look almost the same from far a away and with perfect lighting conditions, but it does look odd quite often. Don't forget they used mitten hands for doom3 in 2004 - when will the first beta of TDM be released? end of 2007? We don't have to keep the polycount THAT low - and it has actually not such a big impact on the polycount, as my legionary would still have almost 500 polys less than oddity's guard model with mitten hands

[Domarius]

So can you show a comparison of your leigonary hand and one of oDDity's normal (not mitten) hands?

 

I personally never noticed the Doom 3 guys had mitten hands till now.

[Springheel]

I noticed it. I'm not sure we need to be saving polys in that way.

[Domarius]

Well BT says his non-mittened model is still less polys than the mittened version of the guard would be.

 

BT - you are talking about the tesselated triangle count, not the untesselated quad count, right?

[Dram]

I just imported odd's builder into milkshape to check it out. My fucken god. Those models have quite hires fingers, he hardly reduced them! They're rounded and everything.

 

Just as a test I reduced the polycount of the guard to 50% using the directX tools in milkshape and you can hardly see the difference - the fingers are FINALLY lower res (more squarish, but you woiuld'nt be able to tell ingame) and on places like the boots etc you can't see a difference. Forget the keen eye crap can see the difference, I'm a mapper and so I don't particularly expect people to go right up to people's fingers to check the res.

 

If we keep everything hipoly it'll end up like oblivion - I turned on only pixel shader 1.1 features (no parallax, hdr etc - a customized exe file) and it STILL ran like shit. The reason is poly count. Those models are so friggin hipoly that its not funny.

 

The point is, our lightgem is very good in the functionality regard but is a big hinderence to performance due to the workaround we had to take. This means we want to save performance elsewhere - models for one. ODD's builder guard is 5800 polys or so. I reduced it to half and saw hardly any difference. I think we should try and stay low polyish but still keep our hires models so that in the future we can use them, like with textures.

[BlackThief]

Well BT says his non-mittened model is still less polys than the mittened version of the guard would be.

 

BT - you are talking about the tesselated triangle count, not the untesselated quad count, right?

 

yes I did a comparison yesterday. As Dram said oddity's hand were really detailed, they're a little more than 500 triangles each. My unoptimized hands are around 370 tris, but they have some edge loops, that are probably not necessary - so I reduced them to 300 tris. I'm not 100% sure anymore, but as far as I remember oddity's mitten hands had around 170 tris, so the difference is not THAT big imho.

[Springheel]

Ok, I think that settles it. We'll go with BT's full fingered approach. Doesn't sound like Odd optimized his models very well, so we'll be able to save in other ways besides mitten hands.

[Dram]

Ok, I think that settles it. We'll go with BT's full fingered approach. Doesn't sound like Odd optimized his models very well, so we'll be able to save in other ways besides mitten hands.

 

Indeed, I was able to reduce the polys on 90% of the builder to about half with almost zero visual quality loss. He did'nt like low poly models i guess....