question about polycounts

Aga22

okay i'm sure this has been anwsered a billion times but i couldnt find something... :poly122:

in current gen games (FPS), the hero's gun (a machinegun) , roughly how many polygons it should be?

MiAlx

You really couldn't find anything?

I found these in literally 5 minutes:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975

http://www.rsart.co.uk/2007/08/27/yes-but-how-many-polygons/

http://www.polycount.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-64618.html

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98210

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40563

http://www.polycount.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-46398.html

happy reading

Aga22

MiAlx thanks, but i didnt find something specific about guns in first person shooters... most of these are about characters or total polygon count in scenes

MiAlx

Hmm yes..

But, for example in the beyond3d post:

SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

In this case, half life 2, didnt really have arms in the FP view, just hands, if i remember correctly. So if you take away, what, 400 polygons that would be the hand? You can roughly estimate it for the weapons in HL2.

There isn't really a magic count that goes for all FPS, that's the main thing.

Call of duty for example has, i'm guessing, a higher count for the weapons than say Left 4 dead 2, but lower than crysis.

So it really depends on the project and what's necessary to keep the performance up for the game.

S_ource

Half life 2 is pretty lowpoly compared to nowdays so you could have higer limit.

Kon Artist

Some advice I got when I was at GDC earlier this year was: Have polycounts 2x to 3x times higher then current gen. This generation of consoles is almost over... So making things a little heavy poly wise isn't a bad thing. Having a 2k texture on an oil barrel would be.

Aga22

so if consoles are 5-6000 tris, and they are.. around 5 years old technology, a 10-12.000 count is preety realistic, right?

Kon Artist

I wouldn't stress over a few polys, unless you've been given a budget. More important is effective UV layouts, understanding UV space, baking, and making awesome looking texture maps.

In the links MiAlx posted there's info on gun poly counts... pretty good stuff.

Aga22

thanks for the replies everyone. i guess making it current-gen console spec is the most sensible route.