> And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."
I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades.
What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.
+1 I also think they have multiple levels of detail and render the appropriate one based on distance/view.
Should have said so though, as is, it's full of misleading statements (often by omission).
I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades.
What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.