The development of a video game is a complex process that involves a huge number of crucial technological challenges. The modern three-dimensional computer games are based on 3D objects that are constituted by million polygons.
Many limitations affect the number of polygons that can be rendered on standard computers. Developers would like to optimize such a number in order to use as few local computer resources as possible. This article aims at providing you a solution in such a direction by introducing you to AMAZ3D products by ADAPTA studio.
Most video games are made up of thousands of 3D objects that lead to deal with million polygons. The number of polygons rendered in a video game strongly depends on the computer processing power available to players.
Computer graphics technology has already improved so that complex objects can be realistically replicated on the screen. For example, a 3D model created in Autodesk Maya or Blender, when accurately scaled, can represent objects in a realistic way, by using techniques such as Polygonal Modeling, Sculpting, 3D scanning and Photogrammetry.
However, when an object (or object-like surface) is rendered on a screen, it is perceived as squished or stuffed if it is described by too few or too many polygons. This leads to visual distortions, especially on low-end computer hardware. Moreover, a huge number of polygons yields important performance issues such as stuttering, slow rendering, graphical bugs, FPS drops.
A possible solution is to resort to LOD (Level of Detail) which means to create different versions of the original 3D object with a different number of polygons, in order to account for the possible different actual distance between the camera and the 3D object. In particular, the more the distance from the camera to the LOD, the less the polygons which compose the object. By using LOD, we can obtain better results in terms of 3D rendering quality, while using less local computational resources (CPU, RAM and GPU).
One of the biggest challenges in game development is the polygons number optimization
The polygon count in each game scene is one of the most important elements to consider in game development. A large number of polygons in a game scene can have an impact on the performance of the game or on visual fidelity. Ideally, in order to consume less resources, only the polygons that you see need to be preserved, whereas polygons that do not describe important object details have to be removed.
Indeed, the more polygons are in a model, the more polygons your computer has to work with, for each frame; this unavoidably results in a high CPU and GPU load as well as in slow game play performance. Vice versa, if your 3D objects are composed by a very little number of polygons, you may loose quality in your scenes and it might be very hard to understand what’s going on without having visual glitches.
To tackle these issues, developers often resort to software tools which reduce the number of polygons of the original 3D object, while preserving rendering quality and other important graphical features (e.g., UV coordinates, animations and normals).
As an alternative, remote hardware (game streaming) or techniques standard in computer programming (e.g., parallelization and GPU computing) can be employed to deal with the polygons number optimization. This allows developers to perform computations on multiple cores at the same time, without waiting each core turn to be activated!
This challenge can be overcome by using AMAZ3D products by ADAPTA studio
In video game development, the demand for new software and services is supported by the need to achieve better and better polygon optimization, namely, to ensure a high rendering quality by using few polygons while preserving UV coordinates, normals, animations, skin rigs, etc.
For example, in the case of 3D video games, scenes have sometimes more polygons than the picture resolution of the monitor. This means that a lot of polygons are completely useless to be rendered.
Additionally, new technologies such as AR / VR demand for a further increment in polygons number to guarantee the expected immersive effects, and this leads developers to allocate more and more computational resources. Thus, polygon optimization is becoming a mandatory task. That’s where ADAPTA studio steps in with the AMAZ3D products.
AMAZ3D products allows you to optimize 3D objects without using the local computer resources. Indeed, we exploit a cloud platform so that the user can optimize 3D assets directly from the browser
Why AMAZ3D?
AMAZ3D is a new tool for game developers. You can skip any pre-defined pipelines to optimize your objects. Just follow the user manual (available at https://adapta.studio/amaz3d-saas-faq/ or on the ADAPTA studio’s youtube channel) which guides you through the optimization of your assets.
AMAZ3D has four main modules:
- Polygon optimization – The optimization module allows you to reduce the number of polygons of your model, while maximizing the rendering quality. Moreover, during optimization, you can preserve UV coordinates, normals, soft and hard edges, animations, rig and skins;
- LOD presets – While optimizing your objects, you can create automatically custom LOD presets just with a click. AMAZ3D identifies the polygons which are needed for achieving the best rendering quality for each LOD you select;
- Masking – You can preserve vertices and polygons of the original object. Simply, paint the portions to be preserved with a vertex paint (you can use also external 3D digital content creation software). This module allows user to keep details of interest on 3D objects.
- Baking – Normal baking can be very important to preserve details of a 3D. Indeed, normal maps act as a texture for 3D objects and allow to describe details without using too many polygons. This module will be available in AMAZ3D next month.
Do you want to know more? Clic here: https://adapta.studio/try_it/