So just out of curiosity, if I want to make a MMORPG where they will be 100 custom make character which use same bone and same customize system. How to not blow player computer?
I am not looking for a game design trick like in Battelfield 2042 where it just literily dozen of character model.
I am looking for system used in Black Desert, they have cool customization system that deform the character mesh and can still have dozens and dozens of different customized player in the same scene without huge frame drop.
I know staff like hair, cloths(different asset swap), decal, color (modify in shader) are relatically easy to add complexity of a character creation system. Which they can dynamically load from the database.
But look at this screenshot, so many morth target on the face alone, more morth target in the torsor,
arm and leg. How they achieve this without blow up everybody pc? (Probably not skeleton to control the face since 8 bone per vertex is already crazy compare to 4.)
In short you can’t do the same out of the box in unreal, because it’s render pipeline is not optimized for that task.
The game uses Pearl Abyss' custom Black Desert game engine specifically created to handle the fast rendering required for its seamless world and large-scale castle sieges with a lot of characters
Unreal unfortunately has pretty bad performance when it comes to many skeletal meshes.
It would probably need to use GPU instanced meshes for base male and female characters and do the customization morphs in the form of a vertex shader that would deform the mesh purely on the GPU.
I’ve seen people achieve gpu instanced skinning in unreal
an example:
I see. Put the calculation to the gpu sounds safe. It’s possible they use some kind of vertex group and add all of those to the vertex displacement after finish customize the character.
Don’t really know the GPU instanced meshes. Is it possible that everycharacter have unique vertex displacement on the GPU instanced meshes?
I also find out there exist a cpu multithreading on skeleton. That could help a little bit.
The guy in that video is pure gold. Didn’t have a cure on how he achieve that.
