How to proceed to learn how many polys has an asset ?

K

KleinArt

New member
Hello everyone. I am creating a route with a densely populated area. Then I need to know what are the best assets to use in that area - those with fewer polys - in order that Trainz does not bind and does not blink in that area.

Would someone be so kind to tell me how can I get that information more easily?

Thank you very much.

Regards

John
 
Hello John

Built up areas are really difficult in Trainz, and I'm not aware of a simple way to get to a poly count for each asset. My personal rules are:
- if the asset doesn't appear absolutely instantly in the preview window in Surveyor, then it's likely that there's a performance issue with it so I try and avoid it;
- repetition, repetition, repetition- using the same asset over and over, rotating, changing the height and combining with other assets to give a convincing roofscape and building mass gives a convincing overall effect, and keeps the overall number of different assets to a minimum;
- don't get hung up on looking for really accurate representations of specific buildings if you've already used something reasonably similar elsewhere on your route, unless it's really close to the tracks. Treat everything more than about 200m away from the track as an impressionist painting, and just concentrate on the overall blocks and roof shapes/colours. I favour models with good roof textures over finely detailed ones with basic tiled textures for this reason.

Regards

R3
 
The other thing to watch for is the overhead per asset, 300 poly equivalents per mesh and 200 per texture file. kuid:86627:100129 and kuid:86627:100035 are technically interesting in that they are a block of four houses but with enough room between them to drop in other houses. You only pay the overhead on the four houses not per house and it doesn't look quite so repetitious.

The difficulty is more finding assets that fit your layout.

Cheerio John
 
Hello rumour3. I thank and appreciate your feedback and will apply as it seems that there is no simple way to resolve this issue.

Regards

John
 
johnwhelan said:
The other thing to watch for is the overhead per asset, 300 poly equivalents per mesh and 200 per texture file. kuid:86627:100129 and kuid:86627:100035 are technically interesting in that they are a block of four houses but with enough room between them to drop in other houses. You only pay the overhead on the four houses not per house and it doesn't look quite so repetitious.

The difficulty is more finding assets that fit your layout.

Cheerio John
Click to expand...


Hello johnwhelan. Your comments are always welcome. From what I understand you say that other homes can be interspersed between these two you mentioned?

How much advantage is achieved with that or is it just an aesthetic issue?
 
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You can check polys with PEV's MeshViewer. Right-click and select Poly Count. That, of course, requires opening each asset in CMP and clicking on the mesh file, which is an involved process, but it is doable. If multiple meshes are present, then that usually means LoD is implemented.

I too am creating a route and had to make assets for it using some strategies that would normally not be applied to typical assets e.g. making pre-built blocks of housing, using a single block to represent many buildings, etc. Look on the DLS for Rowhouse under my name and see if anything suits you.
 
KleinArt said:
Hello johnwhelan. Your comments are always welcome. From what I understand you say that other homes can be interspersed between these two you mentioned?

How much advantage is achieved with that or is it just an aesthetic issue?
Click to expand...

Using a block of four houses gives you a saving of 900 poly equivalents on the mesh and 600 on the texture file, however if repeated it looks like a block of four houses by spreading them out you get the same savings but its not so obvious.

Cheerio John
 
Hello RRSignal. I thank and appreciate your contribution certainly valuable. But I'm newbie and neophyte with treating meshes and I am a little lost.


I opened the mesh file with the "Trainz Mesh Viewer 2" and I see something like this :


64 Mesh bounding box minimum X, Y, Z: -5,263, -67,452, -4,332
76 Mesh bounding box maximum X, Y, Z: 9,310, 127,611, 7,751


What do I have to do next in order to know the amount of polys?

Should I enter in the blender program ?
 
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Once you are looking at the item in Mesh_Viewer, right-click anywhere in the screen and you should get an option on a list called Mesh Data. The screen that pops up should show similar things to the above but should also have a field called Poly Count. That's what you need. If you don't see that, perhaps post a screen shot, but I've never had major problems with that program.
 
PEV's Mesh Viewer, as described by RRSignal, is a good test for polycount.

AssetX also displays polycount if you highlight an .im file and click the Information button (the i symbol).

In either case, you need to first have the asset(s) "open for edit" from Content Manager in order to 'read' the .im files, and each open asset can only be inspected one at a time, unfortunately.

It's also worth checking an asset's Description. It sometimes tells you the polycount, the number of texture Materials used (the fewer the better for performance) and whether LOD has been implemented. This doesn't require opening the asset.

Look also for assets that make use of 'mesh libraries'. The assets themselves don't contain any .im files, but will refer to a mesh library asset as a dependency. Again, that is something you can check in Content Manager without needing to open the asset. Such assets are good for performance because they cut down on the number of files that need to be read in order to display the assets (I think).

.
 
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Dinorius_Redundicus said:
...AssetX also displays polycount if you highlight an .im file and click the Information button (the i symbol)....

.
Click to expand...

Hello Dinorius_Redundicus. Finally I could solve the problem by "AssetX" + "i". Thank you very much for your help, because I do not know how to continue with the "Mesh Viewer" program. Your advice to check the description of each asset, as well as the "mesh libraries", are very timely and useful.

It is truly laborious asset by asset review to know how many polys each contains. It is desirable that the new version of Trainz (T2 New Era) facilitates this somehow, or to provide some tool to provide this information more easily.

I'm glad to have finally resolved this issue. Again thank you very much.

Regards

John
 
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KleinArt said:
Thanks Johnwhelan for the explanation enlarge.

Regards

John
Click to expand...




This is a simplified version of what happens.

The impact that an asset has depends on a number of things and on the hardware. In a built up area the number of different assets has the most impact due to the 300 mesh and 200 texture poly equivalent overhead. Within each screen shot you have a budget that the machine will support at a particular frame rate.

The size of the texture files has an impact so big uniform colour texture files are bad news. Generally speaking some content creators are better at producing good performing content than others. So if you find one who creates content you like stay with them. I’ve seen some scenery assets that have 30 texture files the poly count is a mere 300 polys but the impact of 30 texture files is about the same as 6,000 polys. Many of these were created in GMAX by users who didn’t understand how to UV map.

The mention of Sketchup should ring warning bells, it is technically possible to create low poly content in Sketchup but it is even more complex to do than using Blender and most Sketchup content creators don’t know how to do it.

Normal mapping can be used to emulate polys, there is a very good Australian Hotel that uses Normal mapping very effectively.

If you repeat an asset it has a much lower impact the second time. In TS12 splines written for earlier versions can kill performance. There isn’t really a simple way to identify the impact of an asset, but in both Surveyor and driver in options general show performance is a way to identify the worse performing asset. I suggest you click show kuid number as well.

Speedtrees use a different rendering system, dig in the forum and there are one or two people who know them fairly well and have created some reasonable ones. Don’t use more than five types.

Trainz is a rich environment that means there is room to make mistakes especially in performance. If you have a tame Blender content creator its quite easy to merge a number of scenery objects into one big asset and avoid the individual overheads.

You can of course just throw hardware at the problem, a faster machine has a bigger budget per scene but it’s possible to build a layout that will bring any machine to its knees.

Have fun

Cheerio John
 
Hello johnwhelan. This tips come very well because I'm trying to achieve a route with complicated areas in density of polys.

This guidance information comes very good to me and to all those Trainz fans who want encouraged to create new assets, according to the new proposal of Auran.

I learned that Sketchup had some problems with Trainz, but was not sure what constituted thereof. So I want to learn how to use Blender and these tips will now be very useful to me later.

Thank you very much John. Your suggestions are very instructive.

Regards

John
 
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I do not understand, why this discussion is still about polygons.

A four sided plane consists always of to polygons (better named as triangles). These polygons can be defined either by six or four vertices. What would you believe has the better performance, the one with six or the one with four vertices, even they have the same number of polygons/triangles?

In your answer keep in mind, that every vertex, which is not welded to its neighbor and therefore can not profit from indexed drawing has to pass the vertex shader process at the gpu...

I tried to explain the contiguity (even in a very simplified way) here http://forums.auran.com/trainz/entr...get-rid-of-a-Polyphobia-(english-translation)

Mick!

Edit: To come back to the initial question of this thread, don't look for the number of polygons/triangles, but for the number of materials used by an asset. This tells way more about the performance impact.
 
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mick1960 said:
Edit: To come back to the initial question of this thread, don't look for the number of polygons/triangles, but for the number of materials used by an asset. This tells way more about the performance impact.
Click to expand...

Would you care to suggest a simple way that a novice can check this?

Thanks John
 
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