Automatic Testing and Validation of Level of Detail Reductions Through Supervised Learning
This addresses a domain-specific problem for video game developers by automating a tedious validation task, though it is incremental as it applies existing deep learning techniques to a new application.
The paper tackles the problem of manually validating Level of Detail (LOD) reductions in 3D assets for video games, which is slow and error-prone, by proposing an automated method using deep convolutional networks and reports promising results.
Modern video games are rapidly growing in size and scale, and to create rich and interesting environments, a large amount of content is needed. As a consequence, often several thousands of detailed 3D assets are used to create a single scene. As each asset's polygon mesh can contain millions of polygons, the number of polygons that need to be drawn every frame may exceed several billions. Therefore, the computational resources often limit how many detailed objects that can be displayed in a scene. To push this limit and to optimize performance one can reduce the polygon count of the assets when possible. Basically, the idea is that an object at farther distance from the capturing camera, consequently with relatively smaller screen size, its polygon count may be reduced without affecting the perceived quality. Level of Detail (LOD) refers to the complexity level of a 3D model representation. The process of removing complexity is often called LOD reduction and can be done automatically with an algorithm or by hand by artists. However, this process may lead to deterioration of the visual quality if the different LODs differ significantly, or if LOD reduction transition is not seamless. Today the validation of these results is mainly done manually requiring an expert to visually inspect the results. However, this process is slow, mundane, and therefore prone to error. Herein we propose a method to automate this process based on the use of deep convolutional networks. We report promising results and envision that this method can be used to automate the process of LOD reduction testing and validation.