Have you explored optimizing the assets to be game-ready?

This kind of decomposition works if you have a single object on screen, and it's super artist + programmer friendly. But the generated assets have ~50 mesh parts, which means importing just a couple of these into a scene and you've blown your entire draw call budget for a shippable game; once you start adding things like shadowing it's game over. It's the brick wall every gamedev realizes after trying to make a scene out of easy-to-work-with primitives. You just can't hit a playable frame rate like this unless your entire game consists of just a few objects.

Have you experimented with atlasing, mesh fusion, baking animations, standardizing PSO's to a scene budget, etc? Because if this can't be automated, I've found it really limits the utility of such freeform generation techniques, since the approach is fundamentally incompatible with performance on today's graphics stack.

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tcdent 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't today's graphics stack moving in the direction of dynamically-optimized meshes (ie. Unreal's Nanite)?

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avaer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Yup. But that's 10x more complicated, and needs an even more specialized baking phase that's even further from the raw representation. It only multiplies the issue.

And Nanite is not really designed for the kinds of lower fidelity fully articulated objects we're talking about here.

I will say though: I think things are going to move to neural rendering faster than people expect. So maybe the future is low fidelity highly articulated objects rendered with img2img. But nobody is seriously doing that yet.

	▲	vrighter an hour ago \| parent [-]
		neural rendering isn't rendering

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baigy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thanks for that feedback. rn I've been chasing editability over runtime. the ~50 parts are basically the source code representation, not necessarily what should ship. since you get the code as well as the glb, my thinking is you should be able to say "keep the wheels and doors separate, merge everything else, optimize for mobile" or change those rules directly in code, then rebuild a leaner glb. The same source could compile differently for web, mobile or desktop. But honestly I haven't built or properly benchmarked that optimization pass yet. I still need to test mesh fusion, atlasing, LODs, collision proxies and material/PSO limits in a properly populated scene, not just on a single object. your comment is making me think this should be an explicit part of generation/export, not cleanup we leave to the gamedev afterwards. appreciate you raising it.

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avaer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My ideal would be the model generates the sources (so it's programmatically tweakable after the fact, which is the entire appeal), but there is an open source compilation tool or something that can optimize it for the different use cases after you've made your tweaks.

Devs could probably make their own version of this; every engine/consumer of assets is different and needs tweaking. But there is no engine that won't choke on the raw version, so someone needs to make an optimization baseline or show how it's possible.

Thanks for considering!

	▲	baigy 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[flagged]

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NimraNoor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

hey, first author here. This is a very fair point. rn we’re optimizing more for editability than runtime. the ~50 parts are basically the source code representation, not necessarily what should ship. since we give you the code as well as the glb, my thinking is you should be able to say “keep the wheels and doors separate, merge everything else, optimize for mobile” or change those rules directly in code, then rebuild a leaner glb. the same source could compile differently for web, mobile or desktop. but honestly we haven’t built or properly benchmarked that optimization pass yet. we still need to test mesh fusion, atlasing, LODs, collision proxies and material/PSO limits in a properly populated scene, not just on a single object. your comment is making me think this should be an explicit part of generation/export, not cleanup we leave to the gamedev afterwards. appreciate you raising it.