How to Create AAA Quality Vehicle LODs for Racing Games with Simplygon
Five expert tips for optimizing high-quality Level of Detail (LOD) models for vehicles using Simplygon.
Creating high-quality Level of Detail (LOD) models for vehicles is essential for maintaining performance and visual fidelity in racing games. When players are driving down the track at high speeds, you need to ensure that your cars look great up close and still are cheap to render when viewed from a distance. In this post, we’ll share five expert tips for optimizing vehicle LODs using Simplygon, the industry-leading solution for 3D optimization. These tips are inspired by real-world use cases, including how Forza leverages Simplygon to deliver stunning visuals without sacrificing performance.
1. Embrace automatic triangle reduction
A racing game usually consists of hundreds of detailed and complex vehicles models. Optimizing each one of these by hand is a time-consuming job. Using Simplygon's triangle reducer LOD levels can be automatically generated for the vehicle models, ensuring optimal performance without sacrificing visual quality.
2. Prioritize the Player’s View with Vertex Weights
In a racing game, players spend most of their time looking at the rear of the car in front of them. To maintain the highest quality where it matters most, use Vertex Weighting to allocate more detail to the car’s backside. This ensures that the most visible areas retain their shape and detail, even after aggressive LOD reduction.
3. Boost Quality for Shiny Surfaces with Shading Importance
Cars often feature glossy paint, chrome details, and reflective surfaces that can have bad reflections if oversimplified. By increasing the ShadingImportance setting in Simplygon's triangle reducer, you can preserve the normals more accurately. This is especially important for racing games where cars are a visual centerpiece.
4. Use proxies for distant vehicles
When cars are far away from the camera, you don’t need the same level of detail as up close. Typically draw calls and transparent materials should be addressed as well. Instead of just reducing polygons, use Remeshing to create a simplified proxy model with a new simple baked material. This approach drastically reduces complexity while maintaining a silhouette that looks good from a distance.
5. Speed matters
In Simplygon’s blog How animation hides LOD Transitions we detail that animations can mask LOD transitions from the player. This means that in a racing game, we can leverage the speed of the cars to mask LOD transitions. So, when a car speeds by, we can be more aggressive with how we switch LOD level then if the car was moving slowly. This also applies to the environment if the player is driving quickly. What matters is the objects movement relative to the camera.
Final thoughts and further reading
LOD optimization is a critical step in modern game development, especially for racing titles where vehicles are the stars of the show. With Simplygon’s powerful tools, you can strike the perfect balance between performance and quality.
Want to see some of these techniques in action? Read out our Forza customer stories below:
- Simplygon Customer story: LOD Authoring in Forza Horizon 5
- Simplygon Customer story: Simplygon saves time, improves visual quality and performance for Forza Motorsport 7
If you are interested in learning more about Simplygon and how it can benefit your game development process, visit Simplygon’s website for a demo.