[Molaris]

between this and Inferno 2, I don't know how much longer I can wait for the colossal amount of AMAZING flying my/our way

[esarai]

Okay I think I got carried away: http://p3d.in/NBaew
Triangulated this is 64788 polies, and it lives inside the Horizon.

[An4ximandros]

I know we have detail boxes and all, but that thing looks way too detailed, a good texture would suffice for half the polies in that reactor.

Edit: The pipes. Looking in wireframe mode, they have too many polies, you should try optimizing them, esarai.

My 2 cents.

[Droid803]

The inner pipes for sure you could get away with fewer sides. The big ones you probably don't want to reduce, but the small ones (and even the medium ones) in the center yes you can save quite a few there.

[Kobrar44]

I know we have detail boxes and all, but that thing looks way too detailed.

It doesn't really look detailed anyhow. Just the ubercurvy pipes and ubercurvy everything. 60k+ polygons sounded like something.. more?..
But once you optimize it to 10-15k triangulated, it'll be a nice addition

[esarai]

but, but... CUUUUURRRVVVES.

[Luis Dias]

esarai, 32 sides in cylinders that are extremely small, almost invisible to everyone else is hilariously exagerated. Give those 6 sides and let the smoothing shaders do their work. The rest, try to be conservative as hell. You could, theoretically, bring that baby to less than 5k without any single discernible degeneration of quality.

my 2 cents.

[headdie]

personally I use 8/16/32 sides because of it working better with subdividing to join the cylinder to the rest of the object.

the issue with low pollies on things like pipes is that though smooth shaders gives a nice gradient, only situation where you look at an end or a significant bend you can actually see the ends of the face which is really jarring to look at.

[Droid803]

I personally never join cylinders to the rest of the object. Doing that is practically prostrating yourself and begging for boolean/lighting/smoothing errors. Why would you do that when it just drives up the polygon count and adds potential for error with absolutely no benefit (the game treats them as disconnected as long as they're not smoothed together anyway due to the POF file format so don't bring up that bull**** about open/closed/non manifold because it doesn't make a bit of difference)

Okay, okay, the one benefit is that you might save a *bit* of UV Space. Big whoop.

[headdie]

dosnt that just cause issues with PCS2's MoI calculations?

[Droid803]

No.

AFAIK that just looks at the bounding boxes/radii. I don't think it has a fancy volume-filling algorithm.

[Hades]

I personally think he should make all of the pipes 64 sided.

[An4ximandros]

Here's my proposal, esarai.

 Make the pipes 8 sided for in-game use and keep that model for the inevitable CGI "blow up ship from inside" victory movie. Erry vodi vvins!

[Dragon]

Good suggestion. I've noticed that there are 32-sided pipes which are not only dinky, but completely obscured by the tokamak. This could be reduced a lot without anyone noticing.

[Kobrar44]

esarai, 32 sides in cylinders that are extremely small, almost invisible to everyone else is hilariously exaggerated. Give those 6 sides and let the smoothing shaders do their work.

I'll tell you more, you could try to fake roundness even more with a normal map. Bake normal map to smooth 6-sided pipe from smooth 32/64/whateversided pipe and check the results. With minor UV tricks, you should get practically perfect roundness

[Luis Dias]

Kobrar, you do realise that the end result is *exactly* the same between smoothing out the shader and making a normal map, right? Although I agree with you, the result is still neat.

[Kobrar44]

Kobrar, you do realise that the end result is *exactly* the same between smoothing out the shader and making a normal map, right? Although I agree with you, the result is still neat.

I remember seeing difference when I tried this myself so I'm not sure if its exactly "exactly" the same, but I don't really know the smoothing algorithms, so whatever you say..

[joelever]

I personally like the detail even though it maybe impractical for the game.   

[Aardwolf]

Eh... you'll only ever see one of these at a time, so the poly count can be a lot higher than for other objects of comparable size. Now if only there were a way to conditionally not render everything outside the reactor chamber 

[LordPomposity]

You could also have the Horizon's LOD1 be the same as LOD0 on the outside, with the reactor turning into a tetrahedron whenever the player isn't inside the hull.