[UE4] Destructible Fire Hydrant

ZacD

Here's my first bake of the model, kinda heavy at 3.6k tris.
I know it's a very generic asset, but I'm going to be adding destructibility, chain physics, and animated water effects. And it's going to be a prop in a larger scene I'm working on. I'll be releasing the asset files as well, but unfortunately since it's being made with some educational versions of software, I can't make it free to use commercially.

Joost

Looks great! 3.6k is quite high depending on what it's for but if it's for a portfolio I'd personally give it more tris. I had to shrink the image down to 25% before I couldn't easily notice the lack of sides on the cylinders any more. I know there are a lot of conflicting opinions about tricount in portfolios. I don't know what the purpose of this large scene is but if it's for your portfolio then I wouldn't over-optimise. Just make sensible choices and make it look good. (imo)

ZacD

Yeah I think I'll bump it up to 4.5-5k and show LODs in the portfolio, label it as game cinematic, and then the other LODs. The chain itself is 1.2k, the rest is 2.4k.

JordanN

This might sound controversial but I think you should add more geometry.

Polygon count hasn't been a bottleneck for a long time. I've even read some posts on here that say dropping a couple thousand polygons doesn't really free up performance much, but using less complex shaders and textures does.

I think even the chains can still stay 3D. On next gen consoles, you have a character who runs around with them in full detail. And this is an open world game.




Of course, always be wise with how you distribute triangles. Triangles that cover large surfaces is better than packing them in very tight areas.

ZacD

Optimized a bit more and got it to 3.9k with adding extra geometry where it needed it. Was able to fix all of the waviness, but there's a few things I want to tweak on the high poly model, mostly want to get rid of the floaters so there's no issues baking a cavity map / curvature map. Also the top is doing a lot better with shadows now, before they were faceted.