Polycount horror

[Paulsw2]

Here are three lovely lamps that anyone making UK layouts up to the 1970s will want to have:

And here are the polycounts for these assets as reported by AssetX:

GWR Gas Platform Lamp,<kuid2:446443:21030:1> 26,306
GWR Platform Lamp,<kuid2:446443:21029:1> 29,616
Ex LMS Gas Lamp 2,<kuid2:446443:21023:1> 21,167​

I was a bit shocked when I discovered this! Suffice to say all examples of these assets have been removed from my layout.

The same creator has uploaded asset, "GWR small water tower", kuid2:446443:21043:1. This is the daddy - a whopping 162,666 polys!

A few questions:

1. Can't we get better details in CMP or in game about high poly items as it's very laborious to open each one for edit and inspect its mesh in AssetX? Not sure if Developer Stats currently indicate high poly items and, if they don't, could they in future?
2. Should a poly limit be imposed on assets in certain categories? We might accet 30k polys for a locomotive, but surely not for a lampost!
3. Should asset creators have to say if their creation is 'low', 'medium' or 'high' poly as part of the uploading process - a bit like food manufacturers having to state fat content?

Is there at least a moral duty on creators to admit if their creation has as many polys as the examples above? Then at least the unwary will not wonder why their layouts have turned into a slide show!

Paul

 

[Mick_Berg]

Wow! How on earth do you come up with a poly count like that?
I'm interested in this and would like to do a bit of poking around.
However the DLS is having a problem finding these items by KUID. Could you tell me the author so I can download them?

Thanks.
Mick Berg.

 

[bendorsey]

I'm somewhat notorious for high poly count items but they tend to be really big (like the Tay River Bridge at over 750,000 polys) but its also 15,280 ft long and consists of over 50 separate image files. I can't begin to imagine how something so small could be so high in poly count unless the level of detail is incredible (they do look fantastic). I'd be curious as to why they are so poly count intensive.

Ben

 

[fran1]

Wow! How on earth do you come up with a poly count like that?
I'm interested in this and would like to do a bit of poking around.
However the DLS is having a problem finding these items by KUID. Could you tell me the author so I can download them?

Thanks.
Mick Berg.

Use your Cm search, author=#446443, should come up with glassblow.

 

[oknotsen]

"GWR small water tower", kuid2:446443:21043:1.

Here you go:

Another model created in Google SketchUp and exported to Trainz with RubyTMIX.

For more on that first thingie... see here.

 

[Mick_Berg]

Use your Cm search, author=#446443, should come up with glassblow.

Thanks.

Probably no need to research, they say things made with Sketchup have high poly count.

Mick.

 

[Paulsw2]

Thanks.

Probably no need to research, they say things made with Sketchup have high poly count.

Mick.

Yes, but the problem is that currently the description on the DLS does not have to say anything about poly count. I think it's time for some transparency - every item uploaded to the DLS should have a poly count attached so consumers can properly identify the 'high fat' content that's being uploaded.

It's time to tackle the obesity in Trainz!

Paul

 

[Dermmy]

It's not just poly count, there is also a rash of models at the moment with image sizes that are completely out of whack. It doesn't help much with the poly count, but you can add an optional 'Size' column to CM which is a dead give away for the over size texture files...

Andy

 

[fran1]

The author of these does say in the description of the asset via CM " another model created in google sketchup and exported to trainz with rubyTmix". In fact all of his/hers say it.

 

[stovepipe]

The Sketchup exporter writes that statement into the config description, and most uploaders don't change it or add to it. I'm assuming the thumbnail is also automatically created too, as they are mostly fuzzy and small. So two pointers right there for you.......

The weird thing is some of these sketchup exported models don't have texture files - so the filesizes are not necessarily that large. Can anyone explain how you can have a 26,000 poly model with no texture file? Is the number of polys related to the lack of texture in some way?

 

[martinvk]

Tsk,tsk. Either the perpetrator of those objects is totally inept or it's another example of the "I don't care" attitude that appears to be spreading. One lamp post is rather useless so even a single mile of them at 100 ft spacing would consume over 1 million polys.

There definitely needs to be a high poly section on the DLS were things like those can be placed. Then if you too want to see a slide show, you'll know where to start. A least Trainz itself won't suffer by association. The last thing it needs is for some casual visitor to get hit be this and then announce far and wide what a poor performance Trainz has.

 

[gawpo50]

Here are three lovely lamps that anyone making UK layouts up to the 1970s will want to have:

And here are the polycounts for these assets as reported by AssetX:

GWR Gas Platform Lamp,<kuid2:446443:21030:1> 26,306
GWR Platform Lamp,<kuid2:446443:21029:1> 29,616
Ex LMS Gas Lamp 2,<kuid2:446443:21023:1> 21,167​

I was a bit shocked when I discovered this! Suffice to say all examples of these assets have been removed from my layout.

The same creator has uploaded asset, "GWR small water tower", kuid2:446443:21043:1. This is the daddy - a whopping 162,666 polys!

A few questions:

1. Can't we get better details in CMP or in game about high poly items as it's very laborious to open each one for edit and inspect its mesh in AssetX? Not sure if Developer Stats currently indicate high poly items and, if they don't, could they in future?
2. Should a poly limit be imposed on assets in certain categories? We might accet 30k polys for a locomotive, but surely not for a lampost!
3. Should asset creators have to say if their creation is 'low', 'medium' or 'high' poly as part of the uploading process - a bit like food manufacturers having to state fat content?

Is there at least a moral duty on creators to admit if their creation has as many polys as the examples above? Then at least the unwary will not wonder why their layouts have turned into a slide show!

Paul

Hi Paul

I can confirm your above poly counts you got. I used PEV's mesh viewer. These poly counts for those items are way beyond being ridiculous. Have a look at Dinorius_Redundicus latest offerings, these are considerably better assets, with far better textures and very very small poly counts. He is noted for turning high quality work with very low poly counts for the amount of detail he puts in and all his stuff looks good in game. I also agree with other comments here, maybe there should be a way of getting the DLS to notify users of the poly count of an item.

Regards
Peter

 

[fran1]

Anyone care to check the poly count on St Phillips Station Bristol, it's down as 5.17 mb so should dwarf the GWR small water tower in post #1.

 

[johnwhelan]

Anyone care to check the poly count on St Phillips Station Bristol, it's down as 5.17 mb so should dwarf the GWR small water tower in post #1.

113,539 polys with 32 texture files so add on another 6,200 poly equivalents for the 31 excess texture files. 120,000 polys in round terms with no lod so I thought that one make just take the record for a single scenery object until I noticed the water tower mentioned in post one.

Cheerio John
:clap:

 

[nikos1]

Its very easy to get absurd poly counts when it comes to cylinders and lofts in 3DS Max, before I started paying attention to the polies in a current project I had over 100,000 polies, after checking all the lofts and cylinders and reducing the number of segments on everything the model (a loco) is now down to less than 30,000.

 

[PEV]

This is really woeful..

Route-builders will really have to take care not to include such rubbish.. The game will grind to a halt very quickly if you have a few of these in a scene.

Those light poles could be less than 1000 polys with one or maybe two textures (and not very large ones either) and from a camera position few metres away they would look exactly the same. And if Deane (Dinorius_Redundicus) made them they would look better....!

 

[JCitron]

I don't think this was done intentionally. The asset creator did this with good faith and uploaded his found objects.

In the other famous post on Sketch-up, I mentioned the 3ds injection molding machine with 256,000 poly hexagon feet. This modeler also did this without any ill-intention. Like we've found out now, the same issue hit us back then in 1995 while we were trying to put the models into the introduction. Little did we know these nearly invisible feet would bring 3ds to its knees as it tried to write out the frames.

I agree there should be some warning for us route builders. This however is the way Sketchup works being a nurbs modeler and not a poly modeler like 3ds Max, GMax, and Blender. Instead of a single surface coming out of the model, it buillds tesselated surfaces with tons of polygons when creating large flat areas which buildings usually have. I might be unclear in my explanation, but this is the way I understand from what my brother told me.

John

 

[Euphod]

From Wikipedia:

In the subject of computer graphics, tessellation techniques are often used to manage datasets of polygons and divide them into suitable structures for rendering. Normally, at least for real-time rendering, the data is tessellated into triangles, which is sometimes referred to as triangulation. Tessellation is a staple feature of DirectX 11 and OpenGL.[SUP][4][/SUP][SUP][5][/SUP]
In computer-aided design the constructed design is represented by a boundary representation topological model, where analytical 3D surfaces and curves, limited to faces and edges constitute a continuous boundary of a 3D body. Arbitrary 3D bodies are often too complicated to analyze directly. So they are approximated (tessellated) with a mesh of small, easy-to-analyze pieces of 3D volume — usually either irregular tetrahedrons, or irregular hexahedrons. The mesh is used for finite element analysis.
The mesh of a surface is usually generated per individual faces and edges (approximated to polylines) so that original limit vertices are included into mesh. To ensure that approximation of the original surface suits the needs of the further processing, three basic parameters are usually defined for the surface mesh generator:

• The maximum allowed distance between the planar approximation polygon and the surface (aka "sag"). This parameter ensures that mesh is similar enough to the original analytical surface (or the polyline is similar to the original curve).
• The maximum allowed size of the approximation polygon (for triangulations it can be maximum allowed length of triangle sides). This parameter ensures enough detail for further analysis.
• The maximum allowed angle between two adjacent approximation polygons (on the same face). This parameter ensures that even very small humps or hollows that can have significant effect to analysis will not disappear in mesh.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

....Can anyone explain how you can have a 26,000 poly model with no texture file?

Yes I can. It's a quantum-mechanical effect similar to how a neutron star forms. When enough mesh vertices and edges are jammed into a small volume, they reach a critical density and merge into a texture, releasing huge amounts of lethal gamma radiation in the process. This is the real reason why I try not to do high-poly meshes.

 

[Euphod]

So, in effect, it's the edges of each polygon that that form the texture?:hehe: