This week session was to look at techniques used by developers to create assets that will be used in game engines.

Level Of Detail

Level of detail is a method of switching out a model with a lower poly count version of that model as the camera/player moves away this process frees up resources in a game engine. I create this process by taking a highly detailed mode from Mudbox exporting it into Maya then make lower detailed version using the reduce tool till I’m left with various detailed levels of the same model.

With these models created I then add them to a LOD group, this special group allows Maya to recreate the level of detail effect game engines have, as the camera moves away from the model they are swapped for a lower detailed version of that model. The next step was to adjust the settings so that the swap would not be noticeable to the user/player, below is the result of this.