Requirements and Restrictions

With the move into this current generation of consoles, we’ve been able to afford more verts on weapons than previously which allows us to get more interesting model detail when necessary. That’s not to say you can be reckless, wasting thousands of verts and not paying attention to your limits, but it’s not as much of a restriction as it used to be. Unlike verts however, texture memory still presents a big limitation. While we can afford larger texture resolutions now we have to be careful with how many we use. In a game like Call of Duty, authenticity and great visuals are key, so we obviously want to make sure the guns get enough texture res to look crisp and highly-detailed, which is a balancing act with memory budgets. There’s a lot of thought put into how many unique materials each gun is allowed and how big each of those materials can be. Due to texture resolution constraints how you layout your UVs is very important because it can help you maximize your texel density where it matters to get the most out of your limitations. Additionally, every gun will have both the first person model and what’s called a world model. Because the guns in first person tend to have very dense geometry and a lot of model detail they need to be reduced when put into the character’s hands in the world as the model is not seen as closely or interacted with in the same capacity as it is in first person. It is also costly to performance to have all the gun models in the world being drawn with so much geometry detail. Therefore, it’s important to alleviate this problem with the use of LODs so the gun reduces in detail as it gets further from the player.