How to fix/merge sections in parts from old models

[feersum.endjinn]

Norsu told me to post here as apparently some other people have also had problem with their models ending up with waaaay too many sections despite faces sharing same material and texture. This apparently happens often when parts from old OFP MLODs are copied into new O2.

And as everyone hopefully already knows, too many sections = baaad for performance.

This is our starting situation. Note number of sections in status bar on top of O2. This is waaaay too much for such middle LOD and as such, ingame performance more than halves when there are full squads worth of soldiers with RK95 onscreen compared to if they were equipped with BIS' M4's.

http://www.somuchforsubtlety.net/arm...ionfixing1.jpg

Now, to fix that we first select all faces that are supposed to be in same section and hit "E" key to get to face properties dialog. Note that "User value" field is empty instead of having number there, it means faces in selection have different values in there, which causes them to be split into separate sections. We type there "0" and hit Apply.



We do same thing for textures and material fields in they contain "..." and make sure that Lighting & Z-bias also have identical values.

http://www.somuchforsubtlety.net/arm...ionfixing3.jpg

Now we can see that amount of sections has dropped to 3, but model still contains 1 section for muzzle flash and 2 sections for weapon. It is a lot better, but we want to still get it down to just 2, muzzle flash and weapon.

Next step is going to "Face" menu and selecting "Sort"

http://www.somuchforsubtlety.net/arm...ionfixing4.jpg

Often after this operation number of sections displayed doesn't want to update right away, so we go into another LOD and then come back to editing same LOD. After this small detour however finally our model is where we want it to be - one section for muzzle flash and one for whole weapon LOD and now ArmA engine can render whole weapon using single Direct3D call which makes modern GPUs very happy.

http://www.somuchforsubtlety.net/arm...ionfixing5.jpg

<span style='color:red'>4 hotlinked pictures over 100kb removed.</span>

[Messiah]

I love you... I really do

[Norsu]

Note that this doesn&#39;t apply only to old OFP models. If you import something from MLOD ArmA models you need to check sections carefully then too. Also when using mass texture renaming tool sections can get screwed.

[RN Malboeuf]

nice tute &#33;

btw can someone explain what is section and what for it used by the game ?
i also wonder if this kind ofoptimization is done automatically after binarization ?

[.kju [PvPscene]]

Cheers feersum.endjinn

[granQ]

oh damnit.. just when i was done with my weapon

Thank you, my HK G3 now only got 2 sections.

Ok, so anyone have guidelines whats ok for weapons (2), plane (?), tank(?), apc(?)... less is more i understand but still, anyone?

[CameronMcDonald]

SHWEET&#33; i&#39;ll get to this immediately&#33;

EDIT - Just curious, does this mean that each different texture has a different section, in a perfect world? If so, apologies for the stupid question.

[DaSquade]

Thanks for the tutorial. I always wondered how do clean up the sections....Like above said, in frensh models you normally don&#39;t have to clean up, but sometimes it can help when you had to fix small stuff (st errors) and other stupid things you overlooked...
It already helped me with one of my models where i knew it had to be lower by default.
Again, big thanks.
->Mod, can this be sticked please. This is very imported info (kicks wiki).

OFFTOPIC: If time allows, i or someone should make a tutorial about ST errors, Non-planar faces and Non-linear mapping errors.

[Norsu]

EDIT - Just curious, does this mean that each different texture has a different section, in a perfect world? If so, apologies for the stupid question.

Yes and no . If you have texture that uses two rvmats then it&#39;s two sections. Identical texture + rvmat pairs should be in the same section.

You can enable sections toolbar in Oxygen from Windows->Resource Library.

[W0lle]

feersum.endjinn

Yesterday I asked you in a friendly PM to edit the 4 way too big images, you read the PM and obviously decided to ignore my direction.

+1 WL for the 4 pics and ignoring me is more then just fair I think.