RE: [GD-Consoles] Textures vs. Polygons

[Jamie F. <ja...@qu...>]

I had a half insane idea for character rendering on PS2. I'm probably not
the only one who's had it, but I'll share it anyway :)

One of the limitations on PS2 is the number of matrices you can fit on VU
for skinning (don't worry, this will get relevant to your problem). So to
counteract this, you could split the character geometry according to which
matrices it uses. This way you'd never _need_ more than 3 * M matrices on VU
at any one time (where M is the maximum number of matrices applied per
vertex). You may, of course, choose to lump in a few more matrices.

From a texturing point of view, this should fairly naturally split the
geometry into chunks which are skinned, so you can then use textures more
efficiently, and use several per character effectively.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually done this :)

Jamie


-----Original Message-----
From: gam...@li...
[mailto:gam...@li...]On Behalf Of R
& D (GameBrains)
Sent: 20 November 2001 06:19
To: gam...@li...
Subject: [GD-Consoles] Textures vs. Polygons


List has been quiet of late and I have a semi-OT question....

Technology has come far enough in close-up character rendering that the
skins for characters seem to take up too much precious space for the quality
they show on screen and I was wondering if there are solutions around this.
For example, when you see a character up close that has been skinned, even
with a hi-res texture you can see pixelation around the places like the neck
etc. and the pixel filtering makes it look really not natural when compared
to the individually textured environments in the background.  The "easy"
solution is to not use skins, but to individually texture each part of the
character, but then the subtle detail of clothing seams and shadows is gone.
To get around this we could use shadow maps, decaled textures, vertex
coloring, etc.

1.  How have others solved this problem, especially on consoles such as the
PS2 where texture cache is limited?
2.  For those using skins, what has been a good resolution for the skin for
consoles?  For PC?
3.  Can multi-texturing and other solutions actually solve this problem?

Any advice that those have to offer would be welcome:)  Most of our previous
games have used rigid body objects rather than organic characters, so we are
new to the problems that are likely old-hat to everyone else...

Thanks!
Brett


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