Coming Soon to Planet Coaster: Thememaker's Toolkit

polycount

One last question.
I pretty much assumed items made with the toolkit would be a whole lot better for our park's performance, but I read something that made me think this may not be as straightforward as I thought.

So just as there are piece-heavy blueprints now, will there also be possible high-poly blueprints that will have a similar effect on our parks and we should preferably use sparingly?
( or high vertices, faces or how that all works and whichever is important here... )
Plus, if so, how do we know this? ( Can we know this? ) Is there a way we will know this in advance of downloading? Or in game - like we now can select a 'regular' blueprint and see the piece count, could we see the poly count and if so, how much IS too high / considered to use sparingly ?
Also, curious, is this then more a matter of size of the blueprint itself, or does it depend on how the artist makes them?



Well, I guess that's one last questiion, split up into several [bored]

A good game artist knows how to work with a low as possible amount of polys and using textures to ad even more detail which are actually not in the model itself. Such a person will also check out his work and delete or fill unnecessary faces to export the model as clean as possible.

But i'm afraid that there will be people who are new into creating game assets literally start sculpting out one brick and duplicate them to create a wall, instead of using a texture of a brick wall. So yeah, you make a good point, i hope we will be able to see how high the polycount of a model is.

Another thing. One reason why some parks are slow is because many people combine certain pieces to create something else with them, but than they stick 90% of the pieces into the ground or a wall because only that other10% is the part what they need. Many times they duplicate this hundreds of times. They do this because they can't find what they want, so this is their solution. This is one reason why some parks run slow. This is why this toolkit is so great. Now we can finally create those missing pieces.
 
I have to say, seeing this feature actually come to Planet Coaster, especially since it's only 2 years old from its official release, is absolutely amazing. I cannot wait to see what content that users will create with it and how it works. Keep up the amazing work!
 
But i'm afraid that there will be people who are new into creating game assets literally start sculpting out one brick and duplicate them to create a wall, instead of using a texture of a brick wall. So yeah, you make a good point, i hope we will be able to see how high the polycount of a model is.

Hopefully there will be warnings set in to ask if you are really wanting to have that much polycount for its size and so on! Then there's always another method to weed out: rating and comments.
 
A good game artist knows how to work with a low as possible amount of polys and using textures to ad even more detail which are actually not in the model itself. Such a person will also check out his work and delete or fill unnecessary faces to export the model as clean as possible.

But i'm afraid that there will be people who are new into creating game assets literally start sculpting out one brick and duplicate them to create a wall, instead of using a texture of a brick wall. So yeah, you make a good point, i hope we will be able to see how high the polycount of a model is.

Another thing. One reason why some parks are slow is because many people combine certain pieces to create something else with them, but than they stick 90% of the pieces into the ground or a wall because only that other10% is the part what they need. Many times they duplicate this hundreds of times. They do this because they can't find what they want, so this is their solution. This is one reason why some parks run slow. This is why this toolkit is so great. Now we can finally create those missing pieces.

Cheers for your response Cheese Schnitzel
 
From the sounds of it all models have to go through a web based uploader/extra tool before they'll be available in game. This isnt going to be a case of dumping any old .fbx file into a game folder.
If frontier are doing this properly (and it seems that way), their formatting will include a rating for how heavy something is and spit back warnings if someone is trying to upload something which is half a million polygons. Given how many people who have never tried to model something before will be having a crack at this, it's essential - i've had people with a couple years experience on my team submit finals models which have flipped faces, ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎loads of loose vertices and un-welded surfaces. Making a model is easy - keeping it clean is the real work.

People interested in doing it properly should start reading polycount - this page is a great resource for how PC modeling will go for most people - http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments
the entire forum is a great resource for learning.
 
Interesting.

Yes I can imagine this is not something you would get good at with solely practice, like painting. For this you'd probably have to be willing to dive into the 'hardcore' theoretical part.
(and put the work in)

My appreciation for 3d artists has grown with everything I've read in this and other threads!
 
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Thanks for the link, Neil!

I myself foresee TMT to really shine in making the small-scale detail objects that are ubiquitous in real parks but which are very difficult if not impossible to make with the existing Frontier parts. Basically, stuff you might want many copies of in your park but which at present you can only approximate at the cost of huge part count. Stuff like drinking fountains, turnstiles and 1-way gates, condiments and napkin dispensers for tables, fire department connections for building sprinkler systems, strollers, wheelchairs, banks of lockers, etc. Also things like arcade and midway games, chaise lounges, spiral escape stairs, service ladders with fall cages, etc.

Has there been any word on the max size of textures or whether 1 model can have multiple textures?
 
By the way, did we get any word on LOD models? The game does a fairly adequate job in down-scaling or even hiding object when zooming further away, thus keeping the performance somewhat acceptable. However, for this to work all models are equipped with low-end versions and a ruleset on what should happen when being rendered from a certain distance.

If custom object do not support those, they always get rendered in full detail, forcing us to use them moderately. Then it would even be more efficient to use thousands of optimized vanilla objects than a dozen of custom ones.
 
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By the way, did we get any word on LOD models? The game does a fairly adequate job in down-scaling or even hiding object when zooming further away, thus keeping the performance somewhat acceptable. However, for this to work all models are equipped with low-end version and a ruleset on what should happen when being rendered from a certain distance.

If custom object do not support those, they always get rendered in full detail, forcing us to use them moderately. Then it would even be more efficient to use thousands of optimized vanilla objects than a dozen of custom ones.

Maybe the online tool will make it automatically using a "decimate modifier" (like in Blender or other 3D programs) to turn down the numbers of vertices and faces. Other wise it will start to get too complicated for the New 3D program users adding an extra step (modelling, uv mapping, texturing, LOD, etc...). Hoping it would do the same for textures, you provide the best texture, like 4K, and it would convert it to make a 2k, 1K, etc... version of it.

Just like what youtube does for videos.
 

Joël

Volunteer Moderator
I have been thinking about the Thememaker’s Toolkit and thought of something that would be awesome to have as custom scenery; shop skins! We would need to have a shop without the box around it to work, and then we could create amazing shop skins such as the Cheef Beef concept shown in the picture below :D

GameAssetRender_BurgerQueue-pc-games.png
 
Some good things have been mentioned in these last couple of posts. Which led me to the following question.
Will the toolkit work like or provide some kind of a checklist? When you miss something important with your uploaded model, that the toolkit will tell you what that is? This could be a huge time-saver in some cases
 
A good game artist knows how to work with a low as possible amount of polys and using textures to ad even more detail which are actually not in the model itself. Such a person will also check out his work and delete or fill unnecessary faces to export the model as clean as possible.

But i'm afraid that there will be people who are new into creating game assets literally start sculpting out one brick and duplicate them to create a wall, instead of using a texture of a brick wall. So yeah, you make a good point, i hope we will be able to see how high the polycount of a model is.

Another thing. One reason why some parks are slow is because many people combine certain pieces to create something else with them, but than they stick 90% of the pieces into the ground or a wall because only that other10% is the part what they need. Many times they duplicate this hundreds of times. They do this because they can't find what they want, so this is their solution. This is one reason why some parks run slow. This is why this toolkit is so great. Now we can finally create those missing pieces.



for example there should be a limit of how many vertizes can be uploaded second life goes by 95k is the max for one model, the heavy the item and more of the items it will cause performance drops so in order to reduce this I think they should put on steam profile expert modeling that way we will know. I am not sure how .fbx files work I am still looking into that I use .dae files.
 
Can the toolkit handle animated textures? Has it option for Alpha , and deformation maps like vektordisplacement, normal and bumpmaps? I hope ur planing on expanding the toolkit to give us options to build own rides coasters and have access to some ingame mechanics. Hope dies last[yum]
 
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