RolStoppable said:
Let me chime in here to say that Monolith was lazy. It's perfectly possible to achieve both things at the same time with a simple technique called level of detail that already came to use during the fifth generation. What it means is that there isn't just a single model for every character, but two or more, and depending on the situation they get swapped on the fly. So if a character gets farther away from the camera, a less resource-intensive model is used, and that works the other way around too. It's just that Monolith couldn't be bothered to create higher quality models, not even for the cutscenes where the designers have complete control over the camera angles that are used. Or perhaps it wasn't considered important enough to go through the trouble, given that all cutscenes show the characters with their current equipment; it probably would have taken too much time to get everything up to the same standard. |
Actually, just the other day I read that characters DO have a more detailed model used for cutscenes in Xenoblade. Supposedly the cutscene models have about 1000 more polygons in the faces. The extra polys going to the faces would make sense with your suggestion that the equipment played a factor, as the faces are the part of the model that would be least affected by equipment changes.
I suppose I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Monolith is just lazy though.
