Appropriate Poly Count for non-baked UE4 Models (Arch-Vis)

Bletzkarn

I'm modelling playgrounds for UE4 and am not doing low-poly / high-poly bake workflow. Mainly because it's not needed for a lot of models and these models will be used for VR.

The playground is separated into components. A playground can have between 10 - 30 components in it. So what is a good polycount I should aim for? Potentially I'd want this to run on a mobile device as well.

My first couple components range between 10k - 40k polys which I realise is too much, and most of these polys are coming from small details which I realize are not required. It would make it easier to optimize if I set a hard 10K limit. Which means a total of 300K polys for a big playground. Keeping in mind some of these models will only require ~2K

Obscura

Do some tests on the target device. But I would be surprised if a few hundred K would give hard time even to a mobile device. I was working on some mobile games made with Unity years ago, and some of the levels had bigger polycount than 300k and it was running totally fine. I would say a bigger limitation is probably texture memory and shader complexity here.

Bletzkarn

Obscura said:

Do some tests on the target device. But I would be surprised if a few hundred K would give hard time even to a mobile device. I was working on some mobile games made with Unity years ago, and some of the levels had bigger polycount than 300k and it was running totally fine. I would say a bigger limitation is probably texture memory and shader complexity here.

Thanks for the feedback, fortunately I'm using extremely efficient materials as 'pure' materials are more accepted in arch viz (all materials are literally just vector / constant based atm.

PixelMasher

polys dont matter so much any more, as long as it runs on the target hardware. VR is easily killed by complex shaders or alpha/opacity etc, most engines can chew through polys quite easily. I would use as many as are needed to look good and then just have LODs for optimization if the framerate is being killed. for small scenes I dont imagine it being an issue.