[Blender 2.79b] Triangulate the faces or not?

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Be careful about assuming that frame 30 is exactly 1 second... Korman exports your animations at the framerate specified in the Blender timeline. So, if you've set that to 24fps, frame 24 is 1 second of animation.

Hoikas, doesn't the Plasma engine render animation in-game at a default 30fps?
And if so, doesn't that mean creators should take care to ensure our animation framerate matches that rate?

[Sirius]

doesn't the Plasma engine render animation in-game at a default 30fps?

(Unless I'm wrong in which case Hoikas will correct me), even though the animations are stored as 30 kfps in some PRP versions, I believe Plasma itself interpolates between each keyframe on each monitor frame. So it should always be perfectly smooth in-game. Changing Blender's render framerate will only affect animation playback speed in Plasma since Korman will attempt to match playback speed between the two.
If you don't have existing animations, you can just set Blender's framerate to 60 for more comfort while creating the animations (or higher if your monitor supports higher refresh rates of course).

[Tsar Hoikas]

The biggest concern will be ages exported for MOUL or Myst 5 (what, you don't export your ages for Myst 5?!?!?!). Those games store the frame number as an integer in the keyframes, so it is possible to observe some amount of rounding errors if the framerate you use is not a multiple of 30. Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure if Korman exports frame times at all. Korman always produces animations in the MOUL format and lets libHSPlasma deswizzle them to the PotS format if required.

Long story short, your animation will export fine if you make it for 24 fps, but you should probably save that for when your TV career takes off.

[Sirius]

it is possible to observe some amount of rounding errors if the framerate you use is not a multiple of 30.

Not surprising. This means keyframes might at worse have a delay of 33 milliseconds, right ? (maybe even half that). Multiples of 30 will still have rounding, but much less than non multiples.
In any case, this shouldn't be an issue IMHO - Uru is not a fast-paced game, so this will be barely visible. Especially since most animations are doors opening...

(I'm curious how animations with constant interpolation will look in Plasma though... But constant interpolation in animations is never useful in a real Age anyway.)

Long story short, your animation will export fine if you make it for 24 fps, but you should probably save that for when your TV career takes off.

Ugh. I don't watch a lot of movies, but surely they are recorded at 60 fps now, right ? A lot of people still believe human eyes "see" in 24 fps, but hopefully those people do not work in the cinema industry...

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Ugh. I don't watch a lot of movies, but surely they are recorded at 60 fps now, right ?

Yes. Standard (NTSC) analog video has always been effectively 60 interlaced frames per second, digital followed suit.
Doug Trumbull's Showscan film process was 5-perf 70mm film projected at 60 fps, really good-looking stuff.
And with higher-data-rate pipelines available, we're now starting to see 4K digital screens and projectors available as well as 120fps rates...but getting both at once may still take awhile!
As always though, the question is whether consumers will actually see the difference.

[Tsar Hoikas]

Yes. Standard (NTSC) analog video has always been effectively 60 interlaced frames per second, digital followed suit.

Of course, those are the displays, which tend to be pretty well tied to the AC current frequency of 60 Hz. Film is still generally shot at 24fps. It was a minor controversy when the The Hobbit was filmed at 48fps in 2012!!! You can find pages and pages and pages about "judder" in movies relating to playing the 24 or 48fps source material on a display that refreshes at 60fps. Facebook even got in on the action by inventing a new time unit called the flick so the math is all integer-based.

[Aloys]

Doug Trumbull's Showscan film process

Wow, somebody is showing is age here. Bring back memories of some of my favorite films..

[Emor D'ni Lap]

Doug Trumbull's Showscan film process

Wow, somebody is showing his age here.

Guilty.

[Sirius]

Of course, those are the displays, which tend to be pretty well tied to the AC current frequency of 60 Hz. Film is still generally shot at 24fps. It was a minor controversy when the The Hobbit was filmed at 48fps in 2012!!! You can find pages and pages and pages about "judder" in movies relating to playing the 24 or 48fps source material on a display that refreshes at 60fps. Facebook even got in on the action by inventing a new time unit called the flick so the math is all integer-based.

Ah, that's what I was wondering about. So even action movies with lots of motion are still mainly 24 fps, then ? That sounds like a good way to get headaches IMHO.
Yeah, I understand better why people claim 48 fps on a 60 Hz monitor is not as good as, say 30 on 60 - it results in a worse frame timing. That's also why some console games still lock the framerate to 30 instead of letting it fluctuate between 30 and 60, I guess. Well, if you ask me, it's still picking your favorite poison - both are pretty bad compared to a stable 60 fps.
On a side note, I have a 144 Hz computer monitor, and I can say it makes a huge difference in 3D apps or when scrolling webpages. Much less eyestrain, which also means less headaches when using it for prolonged periods of time.

I know Facebook used the flick for VR systems, due to it requiring higher refresh rates and proper frame timing. But then I doubt other headsets use this system at all, so I wonder how much of it is actually used in drivers and how much is just marketing.

And with higher-data-rate pipelines available, we're now starting to see 4K digital screens and projectors available as well as 120fps rates...but getting both at once may still take awhile!

Yeah, it's impressive: it's very hard to find monitors that are 4k with a high refresh rate. Usually higher-end technology is simply insanely expensive, but for a long while it seems this type of monitor simply didn't exist at all due to how complex it was to produce.