Lego Bricks Require More Polygons Than World of Warcraft Avatars

[MikailCaboose]

...Well, that kind of sounds weird, but I'm not programming expert (though I hope to be once I finish High School and College), so I'm not one to talk.
Also, Lego MMO? Sounds like it could be interesting.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Well, sure. You could use a billion polygons to make a simple sphere if you wanted. The real question is, when you have two blocks stacked on top of each other, are the parts you can't see rendered? That would just be excessive.

If the graphics engine programmers know what they're doing, the answer to this is no. (transparent objects excluded, obviously.)

A major part of creating an efficient 3d engine is 'hidden surface removal'.
In other words, getting rid of anything you can't see as soon as you can, so you don't have to ALL the work of rendering it, only to have it be wasted because you can't see it anyway.

 

[Kuchinawa212]

hmm so they go the extra mile to make sure everything seems plastic and fake.
That's devotion I'll say that

 

[Exterminas]

Most of Wows graphical appeal in the more reacent models comes from their textures, not the modells themselves. So this comparison is typical for game-developer pre-release-language: Comapre apples to bananas.

It's like saying microbes are way superior to human beings because hey don't need that much bones to move around.

 

[Canid117]

They have more polygons... good for them but I would still rather stare at a night elf

 

[Cynical skeptic]

This is weapon's grade facepalm material.

Of fucking course it takes more polygons to render the little cylinders on lego pieces than wow characters. One could use an infinite number of polygons and still not have a perfect circle. They'd simply have an object with infinite sides that looks like a fucking circle.

 

[Antari]

To me this suggests some severe limitations with the current engine's they are working with.

 

[neoontime]

I heard Lego MMO and I knew then all my prayers had been answered

 

[gigastrike]

Its a block... It needs like what, 12 triangle polygons? What a waste of GPU processing power.

You'd be very surprised how many polygons are required to make high-resolution circles.

 

[The Great JT]

It's those round claspy-hand things. Round objects require additional pylo...er, polygons. Sorry, slip of the tongue there.

 

[_Cake_]

Makes sense, there are a lot of small fine details on the lego characters like the little holes in there feet to make them look just like real lego.

 

[-Samurai-]

Its a block... It needs like what, 12 triangle polygons? What a waste of GPU processing power.

You'd be very surprised how many polygons are required to make high-resolution circles.

Which is where they screw up. An 8 sided cylinder should be absolute minimum. It would look blocky(HAH!), but would still look round. They could more than likely get away with something around 16 sides, have it look just fine, and cut way down on resource consumption. Once the pieces are connected, you won't see the cylinders anyway. I don't know why they're opting for ridiculously over-polied pieces.

I wish I still had GMAX installed so I could give an example. None of my old work would illustrate it correctly.

EDIT:
This picture is something I did a long time ago. It shows how an 8 sided cylinder can still be round. Obviously it isn't perfectly round, so you could see why 16 would probably be more useful.

Spoiler

With the correct smoothing groups, it could pass as round.

Just for comparison, here's a 12 sided one:

Spoiler

Here's 16 sided

Spoiler

[small]Gotta love old photobucket accounts.[/small]

Granted this is from an older engine, but I'd assume that the same basics for 3D modeling still apply.

 

[mjc0961]

Not to mention that WoW will be 6 years old in November... It's not hard to imagine that a current model created for any game would have more polygons than something in WoW.

Which is where they screw up. An 8 sided cylinder should be absolute minimum. It would look blocky(HAH!), but would still look round. They could more than likely get away with something around 16 sides, have it look just fine, and cut way down on resource consumption. Once the pieces are connected, you won't see the cylinders anyway. I don't know why they're opting for ridiculously over-polied pieces.

I wish I still had GMAX installed so I could give an example. None of my old work would illustrate it correctly.

EDIT:
This picture is something I did a long time ago. It shows how an 8 sided cylinder can still be round. Obviously it isn't perfectly round, so you could see why 16 would probably be more useful.

Spoiler

With the correct smoothing groups, it could pass as round.

Just for comparison, here's a 12 sided one:

Spoiler

Here's 16 sided

Spoiler

[small]Gotta love old photobucket accounts.[/small]

Granted this is from an older engine, but I'd assume that the same basics for 3D modeling still apply.

Yeah, but even the 16 sided one is still blatantly obvious in its not actually roundness (I can clearly see all the sides). And in the article, it says that the people at LEGO have a very high standard. They would probably take one look at that 16 sided thing you have there and say, "No way, that sucks, try again." (cookie for the reference, not that I'll remember to come back and see if anyone got it >_> )

 

[Mr Smith]

Why is there a Lego game?

Lego is for building stuff.

 

[Plurralbles]

It's those round claspy-hand things. Round objects require additional pylo...er, polygons. Sorry, slip of the tongue there.

I see what you did thar... and it was awesome.


Myself? Eh, whatever. It looks freakin' sweet.

 

[SolaceAvatar]

Roundness takes a lot of polygons, and legos have a lot of roundness. A basic lego piece isn't a block, it's a block with a block cut out of the underside, with eight cylinders on top and eight cylinders with cylinders cut out of them on the bottom. The block part would be easy, but if you want some serious roundness on the round parts, that's multiplied by twenty-four cylinders on just your average piece.

If you figure an average wall will contain, say, 20X20 such pieces (and using larger pieces won't save on cylinders), 20X20X24=9600 wastes of computing power.

 

[ionveau]

To be fair here, Vanilla wow races have not been updated in..nearly ever. It wouldn't be hard to create or believe this game has more to it graphically than vanilla wow characters.

NONONONONO hes talking about the model not the texture, fire up blender and look at any WoW model then look at a model from any game released in the past 3 years.

The WoW team is extremely lazy with its modeling and 3d objects they only need to make custom models for shoulder armor everything els they make is just textures

 

[Hijax]

Lego MMO?
This might just get me into MMOs again.