Outfit polygon? complexity and the Engine upgrade.

[LilyV3 323]

From the old Forum i just gonna copy this. it was mostly about the headphones, but also is about other items

 

I am not sure what your Engine upgrade will include at all, but maybe while doing that you can consider having a look at this again since this seems to be some deeper technical stuff anyways. It's not a bug but mostly a game behavior, but it would be cool, if the Engine upgrade gets rid of that effect or you could tweak some clothings to lower the possibility of it appearing.

 

As making Lily's original outfit I recognized her lower part of the skirt beeing blurry all the time. Since the skirt was the last piece of clothing I added, I never noticed the possible reason. But while making her Asylum colorsheme outfit showed some strange things happening.

Theory:

1. When your characters clothing reaches a specific amount of Polygons, some clothing parts resolution (and details) are getting reduced.
2. This is not related to the complexity bar of the whole outfit that shown in the designer.

First lets compare the outfits:

No1. Skirt shown correctly



No 2 + 3 Skirt gets bricky on the lower parts



see how the front views white lines of the skirt are blurry.

I tried serveral combination of clothings to see why and when its happening.

It's not the complexity bar causing this:

proof:

No4. low complexity but blurry (removed the top for its 100 layer symbol)


if you compare this with No.1, you see No.1 is showing the skirt texture correctly but has a lot higher complexity on the bar.

It turned out that the headphones especially in combination with the high heels cause this nearly instant. Its not only the headphones causing this as:

No.6: headset but not blurry


This brought up my theory that the headphones do have a heavy impact on this while the high heels have very less effect.
And a closer view on the headphones revealed that it has an increadible high amount of details.
Especially the area where the part around the head meets the earshells? (sry don't know the english wording here correctly) has an ridiculous amount of detail also consisting of many polygons. Well this is what I guess, but seeing the model does indicate this. And therefore I think the amount of polygons is a highly deciding factor when textures of specific cloth get turned blurry. This is not only happening to the flounced skirt, it also happens to symbols you add to some other cloth. e.g. headphones themselves are affected too.

So my suggestion is removing the part where you can see through the headphones from front to rear. The headphones details are rarely something people notice. And no one looks at this while running and gunning around. So it is really an unnecassary detail especially compared to the sacrifice of quality on other clothes.
Fill it and maybe make it look like the white headphone in the middle (just a random imgur pic with gapless headphone)


Its not affecting much of Lily's outfit, but people who may use more complex symbols on their skirts or other affected clothes together with the headset will feel a huge difference.
I think it's time to optimize this, even if I have to say the earphones are a masterpiece in creation. But as said before, these tiny details are not worth the quality sacrifice on highly visible parts of the character.

maybe also optimize some other clothings causing similar efffects very soon by having very much polygons. But I can't tell which other cloth this may be. Lily nearly only has this kind of outfit just with a few different colorschemes.

Edit:
additional thought + pic of the headphones in detail

But the phones in detail:



basically the second headband part between the gaps could easily be removed and the phones would still look good.
Not sure how much this may help, and if other parst may also need some optimization. But I feel there are way more polygons than needed.

Regards

 

 

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

Pretty sure this is because of how APB generates and bakes the character textures/etc to be uploaded and downloaded upon the server.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

Okay, quick explanation on how the customisation system works on a base level. The customisation system has two major parts, one being mesh deformation (used to change the shape of the naked body to match the shape of clothing) and the other being additional meshes, these are things like a lot of piercings, belts, holsters, the bottoms of skirts and some head gear.

 

All things that deform the base shape of the body have no impact on texture resolution. Additional meshes however almost always need additional texture space. Now by default there are 2 "tiles" of texture space on the character texture free for extra meshes. This means that you can almost always use at least 2 extra meshes without having to worry about the resolution being lowered by the system. If you add another mesh, one of the existing meshes will have it's texture resolution halved to make space for up to 3 extra additional meshes, all at half resolution. Eventually it will also half the resolution of the eyes, feet and teeth.

 

Now I don't think I have seen the layout of the headphones, but it is possible that it might use both free slots, and when you add the skirt, it needs to scale one down, and it picks the skirt. The real issue here is that there does not seem to be a way to manually control which mesh gets a reduced texture, and in this case it would be much better for it to pick the headphones.

 

The complexity bar is only there to stop people from killing the texture baking process with too many layers and has nothing to do with any of this.

 

TL;DR: reducing polygons will do nothing, this is a limitation of the system that will not go away.

[LilyV3 323]

@Whiskey, I am not exactly sure if I undertsand that.

 

So every non body deforming item causes an additional mesh, that means in Lily's case the skirt, the phones and the heels? But then the ehadphone as you explained wouldn't use 2 slots because then one slot would be the skirt and 2 the headphones. (pic no 6) where the headphoen and skirt is ther ebut not blurry.

 

wouldn't that mean any Cap/hat or gun holster or backpack would also need some additional mesh?

 

So putting on the heels, a backpack and the skirt would do the same? Thats at leats the logic i tke from your post, given I understand that right.

And iof thats the case everytime 3 are used they would get downscaled in quality.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

Backpacks and high heels do not use additional meshes, they just deform the back and feet respectively. Most hats use texture space on the skull instead of using a texture slot. There are a number of exception to the rule I stated, the only way to figure it out exactly is to trial and error it.

[Nite 261]

Great explanation by Whiskey, and to add to it, from what I've seen I've come up with a brief (but not exhaustive) list of all the accessories that would take up extra texture tile space

• the Skateboard from the skateboad backpack
• Symmetrical leg accessories that require a tactical patch to be worn first (spray cans and gun holsters)
• The lower piece of some skirts (including the flounced skirt in OPs pic)
• The quiver from the quiver backpack (not confirmed)
• chest accessories from tactical packs, mostly any that require a vest to be worn first

 

The easiest way to fix this would be to just have 2 material texture atlases, one for clothing that deforms the base mesh, another for any pieces that add polygons to the base mesh.

Would also be nice to have the texture resolution increased, the current 1024x1024 atlas is just woefully tiny.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

Yeah increasing the resolution would be great, though I fear it's not particularly plausible, since doubling the res means 4x the memory usage.

 

Also, contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with internet usage. Every player generates every other player's models and textures locally on their own PC. This is why people using a certain glitch will still show up normally on most people's screens.

 

Ultimately, giving the character a second texture atlas would go a long way, though I am unsure if the system can do that.

[LilyV3 323]

15 hours ago, WhiskeyTangoFoxX said:

Backpacks and high heels do not use additional meshes, they just deform the back and feet respectively. Most hats use texture space on the skull instead of using a texture slot. There are a number of exception to the rule I stated, the only way to figure it out exactly is to trial and error it.

so technically, it should be possible to change the headphones into more simple ones working like a hat and then using texture space of the skull?

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

Maybe is the best I can say. I doubt it will happen, so you are going to have to work around this.