Obi Rope 5.3: Decimation

Obi Rope 5.3 (get it here) is primarily a bug fixing/stability release.  However, there’s still time to add little, nice new features while we work on much larger tasks (*cough* Burst port *cough*).

Decimation is one of these small features that can really make a difference.

What’s decimation?

Decimation aims to reduce the geometric complexity of ropes, so that they render faster. And it tries to do so in a way that the naked eye can’t really tell the difference between a decimated, lightweight, fast rope and a raw, dense, slow-to-render one.

Basically, it removes geometry from straight sections of the rope, keeping detail in zones where curvature is high enough.

Decimating a rope is really fast, and unless your rope is very low-res to begin with, a bit of decimation will always pay off. So feel free to crank up the new “Decimation” slider in the ObiPathSmoother component and see how much extra performance you get out of it! 🙂

Here’s a couple videos: