PolyCount
by Kevin Mitchell · in Artist Corner · 11/15/2008 (5:04 am) · 4 replies
With the advancements in system and computer game details are developers bound to the poly count of 2000 polys per character? I've been looking around at some games and they seem to be visually well over that mark. Also some time where they show the wire frame of a character and i know for sure its well over 2000 even more than 4000 even.
Can anyone give me some incite?
Can anyone give me some incite?
About the author
Riding Solo since 2005. Current Project: Fated World 2005-Present RPG Engine Tool Kit - Now available.
#2
Thanks.
11/18/2008 (8:03 am)
I was alittle worried about my character i created in max under editable poly then switching to editable mesh and he became 4000 polys but I think i need every poly there was. I'll have to adjust my LODs carefully then.Thanks.
#3
The project we most recently did had characters with 6,000 to 9,000 triangles in them.
Let me warn you that while you can do that... its very difficult to have many of them on screen at the same time.
GPUs are certainly fast enough to render them in real time... that isn't the issue... it's the CPU work involved.
Most game engines still do skinned animation on the CPU. So every frame... every vertex of every character needs to be transformed by bone matrices. The best solutions here are aggressive LOD... less verts is less CPU work in animation.
We also had to thread the skinning work to get an acceptable frame rate with several characters on screen... even with LOD.
Anyway... thought i'd get these issues into your head now before it becomes a problem for you.
11/18/2008 (11:31 am)
4,000 should be fine.The project we most recently did had characters with 6,000 to 9,000 triangles in them.
Let me warn you that while you can do that... its very difficult to have many of them on screen at the same time.
GPUs are certainly fast enough to render them in real time... that isn't the issue... it's the CPU work involved.
Most game engines still do skinned animation on the CPU. So every frame... every vertex of every character needs to be transformed by bone matrices. The best solutions here are aggressive LOD... less verts is less CPU work in animation.
We also had to thread the skinning work to get an acceptable frame rate with several characters on screen... even with LOD.
Anyway... thought i'd get these issues into your head now before it becomes a problem for you.
#4
11/18/2008 (11:58 am)
Another thing with LOD i'm planing to do is to hide objects that are past a given meters from the character I noticed this in final fantasy 11 but the only thing i might do different is to add the hiding/lod combo so you have a visible lod then hide the object 100%. But i don't know how well this will work. This is my first project but ive been looking into a lot of things for gaming functionality. 
Torque Owner Pierre DragoFire Hay
RedlineIT Ltd
Normal situation is you may find some characters have 2-4 LOD's for view distances from 10 metres away and closer and then have few extra lower poly count LOD's as you increase the view distance.
I know of some that have very high poly counts for LOD's 0 & 1 and these are normally set as LOD 0 < 0.5m distance and LOD 1 < 1m.
But it's a situation of playing around with what you want to gain from the higher poly counts, some games don't require more that 4k or even 2k poly counts.