Designing Detailed Clothing

Vlad Outfit [ Outfit] This page describes some best practice for clothing and outfit creation, using the Vlad outfit which you can download original source files for here. The outfit showcases the following best practice areas; Model creation Tessellation PBR textures Space Clothing Shader Weighting and skinning Offering pattern variations Model Creation We recommend following current game character modelling practices; specifically using PBR texturing tools and low poly models with a high detail normal map. For more information see; PENDING LINKS The Vlad outfit was created with a set of high detail models (totalling 1 million polygons) to create normal and tangent maps and a set of low detail models (totalling 12,000 polygons) for upload to the Space platform). Tessellation Tessellation shaders allow you to create multi-million polycount details across your model with almost no performance impact. They are fantastic at creating ultra-smooth surfaces that you can zoom in to as close as you like. Upload a low poly, high performance model And transform it inworld into a high detail, super smooth, high poly but low performance asset using the custom built Space tessellation shader; Using tessellation shaders means you no longer need to sacrifice inworld performance to achieve a high quality product. Tessellation shaders create dynamic multi-million polycount level of detail, controlled by camera distance. They use Phong Tessellation to ensure that hard edges are rounded by tessellation processes. Avoiding Tessellation Seams Please paint red all vertices that run along UV seams. Phong Tessellation can fail on UV seams where the vertices are not connected. This will create gaps in the mesh around UV seams. Our tessellation shader has support for excluded zones - to exclude a vertice from tessellation, paint the vertex colour in your 3D modelling tool pure red (255,0,0). This will tell the shader to avoid separating the mesh on this area. INSERT IMAGES - broken seam. Red vertex. Fixed seam. (Need images) Tessellation or Geometry? Best Practice – where does it make sense to to use tessellation and where to use geometry? Tessellation height maps can introduce complex patterns that would otherwise require extreme polygon counts; such as fabric ruffles, distressed or wrinkled items. They work best with organic patterns that do not contain hard edges - unless they are slightly rounded. As a guiding principal, set the Tessellation Edge to 15. This means no triangle with an edge shorter than 15 pixels will be created. Setting the edge length shorter than this offers marginal visual benefits but may start to impact on performance. Avoid setting Tessellation Edge to 1!