Does UE4 have support for skeletal mesh rig level of detail? I know it has support for LoD on the mesh itself, but what about the skeleton and joints?
I was looking at a CryTek presentation (“Ryse: Son of Rome - Defining the ‘Next’ Next-Gen”) and on one of the slides it talks about how their facial animation system has several LoDs for the blend shapes and joints (260 joints & 230 blend shapes, 260 joints, 70 joints, and <10 joints). Is this possible in UE4?
Also, does UE4 have support for dynamic normals (as described in several CryTek presentations)?
Lastly, what is the limit of skinning influences on a single vertex? I can’t seem to find it listed in the documentation.
you sure can! You can manually create LODs and import them under the LOD settings under the mesh details tab. As long as the LOD has the same base hierarchy and mat IDs, you can remove joints (just make sure they are leafs joints, like fingers, and not something in the middle of a hierarchy, like a spine). You can also import morph target LODs
Internally, we use simplygon for autoLod creation, and you can actually specify joints to filter out for each LOD it creates. Blendshape support for LODs created with simplygon isn’t in yet, but I think it should be coming. I learned while researching this question that simplgon isn’t actually available to subscribers and they’ve yet to make a plugin on the marketplace for people to get. I hope they do, because the tool is a huge timesaver.
For your normals question, I’ll defer to one of the programmers there that might be able to help you. I’ll add him to this thread:)
For vertex influences, you can have up to 8 influences per vertex. Staying at 4 will be more performant, but it can support up to 8.