Polygon viewable only from certain angles?

[Lanceor]

Is it possible to make a polygon only viewable from certain angles?

Or alternatively, can a polygon show a different texture depending on what angle it is viewed from?

Background of the problem:

Some of you will remember the above pic. There are close to a hundred soldiers standing around onboard the ships to show the buildup of an army. In its current form using real NPCs, framerates drop to unplayable levels.

One solution I thought of was to replace them all with simple 2D images on a flat surface. I hope to have eight or sixteen different images, possibly animated, that are displayed depending on the angle of the player relative to the mesh. I know this will look unrealistic up close, but the main idea is to have them look believable from a distance.

Any bright ideas?

[ResolveThatChord]

You could try a few things. If you're not going to see them up close, then you can bump the textures way down to 128*128 or lower.

You can lower the poly count in blender by trimming edgeloops (thus retaining the UV layout, unlike a decimate moifier) on their weapons and armour.

And if it comes to it, you can also use Blender to merge the soldiers into one mesh, then put them in-game as inanimate world objects, thus removing all the unncessary AI from your scene.

[Tamira]

Have a look at the ICArena, where 50 spectators can be seen, all added as static nifs.

[ub3rman123]

Could you make them a flat plane that angles to the direction the player is facing, like the flames in game?

What's the use of having them change based on angle?

Edited December 30, 2011 by ub3rman123

[Lanceor]

Improving framerates while still producing a spectacular visual effect is my primary goal here and I'm brainstorming various solutions. One thing about me is that even though I'm okay with scripts and quests, I'm an ignoramus when it comes to Blender and have to rely on others to help out when creating custom models.

Flat 2D meshes will obviously have the lowest poly count which is why I'm analysing it as a possible solution. I was hoping someone knew of tricks with normal maps or similar. The idea might turn out to be unfeasible, but I won't know if I don't ask. As for a flat plane that always faces the player, it would be very easy to create but it wouldn't be realistic if the soldiers were always facing the player.

My second choice would be to use static statues. Preliminary tests show that framerates will be acceptable (proving that most of the lag is CPU related even though the AI is disabled). The only problem is that my current statue maker is kinda busy with other stuff.

The IC Arena uses very low-poly animated meshes to simulate the audience - probably too low-poly for my needs. In concept, this is very similar to the static statues that I mentioned above though.

Edited December 31, 2011 by Lanceor

[WillieSea]

With decent textures the IC Arena spectators dont look too bad, as shown in my Arean Alive mod.

Check out my screenshot of the spectator in the images gallery: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=13099