question about optermising with alpha layers....

[Bronco]

Howdy guys

Ok so ive been working on my lightsabre for the challenge most of the afternoon,I got carried away (blah blah) turned it into some normal mapping practise..blah blah...and now ive got stuck...well not stuck but wondering which of these would be a viable option.

Basically my low poly model has gone way over the challenge target of 750polys and im oviously now trying to scrap some of those poly back.However ive got to a point now where I just cannot see any polygons that are not being used wisely.

I now have one trick up my sleeve which would be to make planes at the end of all the cylinder shaped surfaces so i can then alpha them.

My questions are:-

1.would this acturally be any more effeciant then if I leaved it as it is. I mean (and I might be misunderstood here) but where I get rid of 9 or 10 faces at the end of a cylinder I also add 3 extra verts for each plane,is it not true its a lower vert count tahts important to the programmers/graphics engine.

2. hopefully this would never happen as id be far more discaplined,but out of curiosity,if I got myself into this lovable mess in a studio enviroment and as part of a team what would be the recommended way out? do the alpha thing or scrap it and start over.

Right,having failed yet another challenge im gonna go to bed,lick my wounds and try again tomorrow.

Goodnight!

john

[Quasar]

Optermizing eh? /images/graemlins/smile.gif

I would start over, you can probably build a new mesh in less time then optimizing your current one; 750 polies really isn't that much.

[Eric Chadwick]

There's always something you can optimize. If I were your AD I'd ask to see the model, and probably a couple fresh eyes would be able to pinpoint where you could shave some.

In a studio situation it's often a balance of how much time do you have left on it, vs. how much of a killer those extra verts might be peformance-wise. Totally depends. Probably faster to optimize the model than to start over.

The alpha planes might be more of a hit than the extra verts, depending. The way I understand it on the PC, everytime you switch materials on a surface, you're dividing up the model into separate chunks of vertices to send to the graphics card. Each chunk, whether 1 tri or 3000 tris doesn't matter, has to be sent separately which can slow things down more than just sending a single 300o-tri chunk of verts.

[Rick Stirling]

And generlaly textures take up more memory than extra polygons, so your method of using alphas *COULD* use more memory.