I also appreciate a well done high-detail asset, but I rarely saw a bunch of ill-conceived meshes as the ones taken from Google Warehouse: most of these "models" seem to have an inordinate numeber of polys just for the sake of it (400ft buildings made as boxes - 12 polys - with 2 ft chimneys made as 2,000 poly cylinders). LOD, of course is an unspeakably evil practice that should be avoided at all costs
or - maybe - requires much more skill that simply using a conversion software
). Last, but not least, textures much too often consist of images taken from Google Maps or Google StreetView: the first are especially awful.
I can only strongly agree with hminky:
Exactly... I would like to see if these wannabe "content creators" are able to make the classic "brick box"
.
I've seen that too and have done both real models and downloads from Google. With Google downloads, I specifically found buildings that I could have made myself. They're simple mill buildings, but the person that created them got the textures and everything that I couldn't get done.
I have seen traditional models, done in 3d-Studio 4.0 for DOS) that had so many polys that they caused the animation to take 18 hours to complete. This animation was an introduction to some plastic training videos. There was some text and titles, which zinged in really quickly. The factory builing, done in AutoCad, zinged in rather quickly. Usually ACad files dork because of the number of faces, but this model was pretty well optimized. Anyway. The video gets to the room full of machines. This is where everything came to a dead stop. There were 12 machines running in the room with all of them producing the same green cup. In reality there was only one machine, but the rest were instance objects. These are like the trees we have on a route. There was originally only one of them placed, but the rest are rendered in memory based on the single tree.
We searched all over the place. Deleted the building, rebuilt the building, redid the intro, removed the cup, etc., all to no avail. Finally as a last resort, we pulled the injection molding machine from the scene. BINGO! We won the lottery here. There were no longer stutters and freezes. The machine model needed to be optimized. The video creator, who also was a modeler but was given this model to use, went through the model piece-by-piece. The culprit turned out to be the feet. There were six hexogonal-shaped feet on the machine. Each foot had 256,000 faces on it. No wonder the video stalled. Once the feet were reduced substantially, everything was pretty smooth.
So yes high poly models can come from any source.
The inherent issue though with Sketch-up models is there are so many texture bits. With Trainz, this is actually the performance killer. The large mesh gets loaded into memory no problem, but the little bits of textures get loaded individually. This causes Trainz to have to load up each texture piece into memory from the disk instead of loading up one master texture with UV mapping plains point to the mesh from the master texture sheet.
To better explain this, it's like using tiny decals with glue and tape on a gift instead of one piece of wrapping paper. Which gets done faster, or in the case of the 3d models, which loads faster?
John