Aleksandr Gruzdev

Technical Artist

Tool for managing views of lods and ship parts.

The idea of this tool came when we started to encounter many similar bugs in lods. Ship is a very complicated thing that consists of many parts, and sometimes it’s very difficult to track every polygon when you make lods. So artist often could miss something and seams could appear between the ship parts, or there could be wrong/inverted normals on the lods.

With this tool artist can easily switch lods on the whole ship with a slider, instead of hiding/unhiding parts by hands, and it becomes easier to see if there's something missing. There's also mode that can switch lods by camera distance.

When artists started using this tool in their pipeline, I have not seen such bugs anymore.

Initially I made it with MEL, but in time I rewrote it to Python and Qt, so it can be easily extended.