TGEA Polycounts

Quote:15. As long as Official Engine Parameters for Crysis/CE2 have not been released, newly forming Crysis based mod teams are limited in what they can do. There are obvious planning stages these teams will go through, however something they could do now ahead of the release of Crysis is to 3D model. Can you comment on polycounts and its criticality within CE2 etc to give them a starting point for their models?


ANSWER
Weapons (1st person and 3rd person bind models)
1st person: about 6000 triangles (same as cryengine1; not more really needed - above, normal maps are not needed)
3rd person: about 1500 triangles

Characters
As we are using attachments we have to split the triangle numbers in the separate parts:
* Heads 3k triangles
* Body 5k triangles
* Attachments 1 k triangles

Vehicles
Max. 20000 polygons is our internal limit

Buildings
Hard to answer - put detail were detail is needed. No real need to go crazy. If you only have a few buildings in your level you can spend more triangles, but you should be careful in City maps.

Vegetation
Between 500 and 2500 triangles for trees -whereas the ones with 2500 should not be used in a dense forest because of the filtrate - It heavily depends on the scenery you want to create.


Misc entities
Depends on the size and the complexity.

If you use one material, 300 polygons for a box are ok. This is the minimum number, one set of material should use in an object, as the setup for the renderer is much heavier compared to the actual rendering of these polygons. This also means you do no need LODs for objects lower then 500-600 triangles (given they only use one material).

QUESTION

How many LODs will be supported in CE2, are you sticking to just the 3 again?

ANSWER

We stick to the 3 LOD's - not a real reason to make 4 (just needs more memory). Polycount is not the big problem when rendering our datasets. Material changes and the resulting draw-calls affect performance much more heavily on modern graphics cards than pure triangle count alone.

QUESTION

Can vegetation be rotated or is it necessary to model many versions of the same tree to stop the "tree tiling" look.

ANSWER

We support vertical rotation of vegetation.

QUESTION

What are the texture resolutions for weapons, character, etc. in Crysis?

ANSWER

Weapons 1024x1024; Character head: 512 x 512 to 1024 x 1024; Character body: 1024 x 1024; Attachments: 1024 x 1024.

A general rule should be that you do not extend 170 to 190MB for the targeted Spec including mesh geometry. The last 60 MB (256 - 60 = 196MB) will be used for dynamic textures (shadow maps).
You should therefore divide the available amount by the assets you want to show in the level.

A good advice is to keep the numbers of different materials per object very low and put more polygons into the object. The graphic card can a) handle polygons much better than loading different textures and b) can give you much more detail with lower memory consumption.

QUESTION

The number of materials per building:

ANSWER

From 7 till 20 materials.

Quote:
Polycount is not the big problem when rendering our datasets. Material changes and the resulting draw-calls affect performance much more heavily on modern graphics cards than pure triangle count alone.

Quote:Give an artist an engine, any engine, and they will bring it to it's knees. It's what artists do.