Hi Jack,

Fortunately it’s easy to “pre-flight” your polygon budget – start with a very crude model and just add a few super-tessellated cylinders from your 3-d modeler…x-plane doesn’t care _which_ 600k vertices you use, it’s just the count. 🙂

Re: the far LOD if you don’t need it you don’t need it; mostly you’d see a problem if you’re out of VRAM – if your computer can run the Q400, you probably have a lo of VRAM. 🙂 (And – the Q400 uses enough texture that 11 MB of mesh isn’t going to be that noticeable.)

Lol Ben, thanks for the heads up.

So technical. So anyway, after reading what you have posted, i believe i will be aiming for about 600k polygons on the 727 Series i am working on now. I think i can get away with that this time around, especially since it wont be out till next year sometime. The Q400 was about 350k total, and that was of ok quality.

I didn’t use any LOD on the Q400 either. Perhaps I will on the 727. It just seems like more work at the moment. You may some good points though.

I am really happy that XP10 will allow us to have a separate specular texture instead of having it tied in with the normal map. This will definitely save a lot on Vram. More so if we save when we just save it out as a one channel 8 bit PNG.

This is awesome. Hope the aircraft designers out there are listening… 😉

Well, the inside of an engine is an interesting case…
– you could put the far view of the engine inside (just a single “cap”) into an outer part of the plane, but only in the far LOD of the main plane.
– make the jet engines have a very low LOD but make them as insane as you want. 500 meters should be MORE than enough.
Result: not only do you get a nice LOD progression, but since the engine details aren’t drawn _at all_ past 500 meters, you pay virtually nothing for them when they’re too far away.
The bypass fan is only 1.25 meters. How far do you have to stand from the thing for that to be < 5 pixels at 45 degrees FOV at the default 1024 x 768 res? About 312 meters.

(In other words, cut over from the insanely detailed fan to the small one at a mere 217 meters and the fan will be 5 pixels when the cutover happens.)

Us 3D artists love detail, and if you give us a bag of polygons, we will use em. give us two and we will use that to.

Just saying, this post can be dangerously fun, if you know what i mean.

/me goes back to studying the inner workings of a PW JT8D-9A engine. 😛

Instancing is in for v10, and yes it has an impact – but the effects aren’t quite what you’d expect.

The impact is: you want to have fewer vertices in your objects than in v9! In v9, an OBJ is sooo expensive to draw (on the CPU) that you get only about 5k to 10k objs total in scene. Since the CPU interacts with each one, you might as well have at least 100 vertices – any less and the GPU finishes the OBJ before the next one starts.

With instancing, you can draw many OBJs per CPU call, and thus the geometry is multiplied. So if you have a really numerous object like a road pylon, you want fewer vertices since the total vertex count can get out of control. We’ve seen well over 50k objs per frame with instancing.