Re: [Algorithms] vipm instancing

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Paul Firth wrote:

> > You can do it by having a list of faces per object (faces can't be shared).
> > Each object will use the same vertex buffer and the same vsplit list, but
> > each object is in a different state, with different VB_Len and
> > CurrentVsplit.
> > This needs memory but if you have a 64k polys object you only need 64K*2
> > bytes per object, which isn't very much.
> 
> This is how I'm doing it currently, the trouble is that every instance uses
> the same amount of memory which is a huge waste if I have many
> instances at a high distance.
> 
> Its annoying because if this idea worked and you could have instances with
> almost 0 memory waste you could have crazy numbers of polys in your
> scene.

How about: have a table of (say) ten vipm instances, which are then shared
by all visible instances of that model.  You'd have some kind of voting or
averaging scheme for deciding what the poly count should be for each of
the ten actual vipm instances.  This would hurt the continousness of the
LOD scheme when more than 10 instances are visible, but then you could
make whole giant forests of vipm'd trees without killing memory.

-Thatcher
tulrich.com