MrSanchez 243 Posted January 10, 2015 Hey, So I recently started working on my first mod for ArmA, a weapon mod with the help of Zach Gibson's tutorial. http://gyazo.com/2577747c24f4337fda63f4719f974866 I was just wondering about the importance of the shadow lod and the collision lod of weapons. Are they both absolutely necessary, and can they be just the same? In the tutorial written by Zach, he states that three versions of the model should be made, one geometry lod which is high-poly, and two low-poly lods for shadow and collision. My main question really is; Can I just make the lods for shadow and collision, identical, to save work? Kind regards, Sanchez Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
da12thMonkey 1943 Posted January 10, 2015 Hey,So I recently started working on my first mod for ArmA, a weapon mod with the help of Zach Gibson's tutorial. http://gyazo.com/2577747c24f4337fda63f4719f974866 I was just wondering about the importance of the shadow lod and the collision lod of weapons. Are they both absolutely necessary, and can they be just the same? In the tutorial written by Zach, he states that three versions of the model should be made, one geometry lod which is high-poly, and two low-poly lods for shadow and collision. My main question really is; Can I just make the lods for shadow and collision, identical, to save work? Kind regards, Sanchez Arma 3 used to crash if a unit died while carrying a weapon without a collision LOD (was related to PhysX when they dropped the weapon) so they were very important to include. I'm not sure if that's still an issue, but the collision LOD (actually called the Geometry LOD in ObjectBuilder/O2) for weapon models only really needs to be a very simple bounding shape with a metal penetration material applied. So it'll literally only take about 30 seconds to make anyway. Shadow LODs are less vital (i.e. the game wont crash) but if you don't make a decent one it has a tendency to make your model look like shit on some graphical settings or introduce some other visual bugs. You only really need to trace the silhouette of your visual model, making sure all the mesh is closed and triangulated (and sometimes apply sharp edges too). They can quite basic too since you don't often need to add a lot of the smaller surface details; things like holes in the ends of barrels etc. are pretty much useless in the shadow LOD. No need to do UV mapping or textures for either on them, so that takes a huge amount of the modelling work for those LODs out of the equation compared to what you need to do to make visual/resolution LODs. Have a look at the various sample models that BIS released from previous Arma games to see how simple they can be made to be. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
MrSanchez 243 Posted January 11, 2015 Ah okay, I'll check out the sample models, thanks a lot! Kind regards, Sanchez Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
