Some questions about doing low poly fences

[duststorm]

Hi,
I'm relatively new to creating low poly 3d content and have some questions about how I can make fences with few polygons.

In my scene I want to have a lot of these so I'm looking for the most efficient way of doing them.
I thought about minimizing the amount of polygons by putting a texture with alpha of the bars on a single non-culled (two-sided) plane.
However, with this technique I run into problems at further distances.

fence_problem1_small.jpg

Up close everything is fine

fence_problem2_small.jpg

But the bars start disappearing quickly

And soon they are not visible anymore

I think this is due to anti-aliasing/mipmapping of the textures.
After some reading I tried using the alpha to coverage technique, but this didn't change anything. Maybe this was because my hardware/drivers don't support a2c (linux, intel graphics), but anyway, I want a solution that works everywhere.

What could be a solution? Would it help defining my own mip maps for the texture, making sure the bars are wide enough on every mipmap level? And if so, how would I do this?

I also have a second question. Would this technique be the most optimal in terms of performance, when there a lot of such fences in a scene, or would the high amount of "holes" in the transparent textures cause a lot of slowdowns?
For the previously shown fence I believe I don't have much choice other than a transparent texture, but for this one I have an alternative.

fence.jpg

Again the bars are a texture with alpha on a plane.
Would it be faster if I did each bar with a separate plane, without transparency, or would the increased amount of polygons only lead to a slower framerate?

These are a lot of questions but I hope someone can help me out here

[metaldev]

What could be a solution? Would it help defining my own mip maps for the texture, making sure the bars are wide enough on every mipmap level? And if so, how would I do this?

yes, if you require fences, the best way is to define your own mip maps. Otherwise you will forever be fighting jaggies and disappearing depending if you are culling or using a full 8 bit channel for alpha.
Another way could be with LOD, you could swap into a model that uses a different texture altogether that is more fitting with its required distance.


I would avoid representing fence meshing with geometry.


/imho

[duststorm]

Thanks for the advice
I have it a little more under control now by using a -1 mipmap bias. Anisotropic filtering on the alpha textures seemed to help a bit also, but I don't think I want the extra performance hit.
On graphics cards (and drivers) that support the alpha2coverage technique there are almost no issues, but as said before that technique does not work on every system.

I believe I will settle with making .dds textures with custom mipmap levels where I widen the bars, leaving A2C enabled for systems that support it.

[duststorm]

A follow up to one of my old posts:
I recently came upon this article which deals with the same problem. The solution proposed here is calculating the mipmaps with a special technique in code. From a quick glance, it is my understanding that it is an improved version of "alpha to coverage".

[Zonder]

I always thought don't use mipmaps.

but if you give the alpha a negative infulance and the rest a positive it should enhance. like a sharping matrix this off the top of my head.

(drunk as a skunk atm so maybe discount this)

[areay]

I always thought don't use mipmaps.

but if you give the alpha a negative infulance and the rest a positive it should enhance. like a sharping matrix this off the top of my head.

Hi Zonder, your post makes no sense

(drunk as a skunk atm so maybe discount this)

Oh......