I’ve finished the LOD models for the stun prod project, that gives us a “final” triangle budget of:

• High: 3134
• Medium: 1516
• Low: 608
• Lowest: 128

Which I think is fairly decent, the “lowest” could probably go even lower if I steal a few more polygons here and there, but I’ll only do that if I end up with an LI that I feel is unacceptable. I still want to maintain a pretty good general silhouette of the object.

I ended up doing a ton of work on my PBR/ORM workflow to speed things up, and I now have a cool little node setup to export ORM textures in a single stage, fast & convenient!

I wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out why my renders in blender look a lot glossier than my texture tests in SL and initially thought it was a color space issue, in the end I just dialed down the roughness scale in SL and that was good enough.

There is an issue with the normal map and I cannot find a good way to fix it at the moment, I get some banding effect, which I assume is due to some limitations of 8bit RGB normal map encoding as they do not occur if I render my normal maps in 16 or even 32bits. I can’t use 16/32 bit images in SL obviously, and I haven’t found a good way to work with those that doesn’t make the banding re-appear as soon as I crunch them back down to 8bit.

Three options there:

• Tweak the high-poly in such a way that the banding either disappears, or becomes less visible.
• Paint over the offending area manually in Krita, if I can see them at all.
• Live with it.

I’m going to try to remember to use larger images in posts from now on :3