Game Development Community

Poly Count

by Kevin Mitchell · in Artist Corner · 10/07/2009 (7:29 am) · 5 replies

So with the advances in game engines and pc outputs, has the polycount limit changed from 2000 polys in the last 10 years?

#1
10/07/2009 (9:54 am)
There never was a poly count limit to begin with.
#2
10/07/2009 (10:06 am)
I think he means recommended limit for decent performance ;-)
#4
10/07/2009 (1:47 pm)
Up from 2000 ?

Yes, yes it is.

I've got a mesh with 93k triangles (split into 22 submeshes to avoid truncation when exorting to DTS). Works fine, good performace. Having 500 lights does bring performance down somewhat (say halfs it), but they can be turned on and off with triggers as required.

Kinda depends what you're doing with it and how many instances there are of course. You didn't say "player character" - though I reckon that's what you mean.

Apparently, animated meshes are a bottleneck for Torque, so need to be aggressively LODed. But frankly everything should be aggressively LODed anyway.

I'd keep LOD_0 under 10k though - personally well under 10k.
#5
10/07/2009 (2:02 pm)
Well, poly limits on characters was always a pretty game specific thing. My artist typically made characters around 3-4k, weapons around 1-2k or less depending on the weapon, and vehicles usually came in around 4-5k.