modern day model polycount
polycounter lvl 6
hi all,
im a beginner modeler and i have modeled a few things but i really have a problem.when im modeling my game models,i dont know exactly how low poly my low poly model should be.i mean,for the unreal engine and in modern games, are the models really that low poly anymore? or is the high poly strictly for extra detail so you dont need to texture as much in photoshop? im just having trouble modeling my game models because i dont know what i should make the poly count budget.
can anybody enlighten me on this?
thanks!
im a beginner modeler and i have modeled a few things but i really have a problem.when im modeling my game models,i dont know exactly how low poly my low poly model should be.i mean,for the unreal engine and in modern games, are the models really that low poly anymore? or is the high poly strictly for extra detail so you dont need to texture as much in photoshop? im just having trouble modeling my game models because i dont know what i should make the poly count budget.
can anybody enlighten me on this?
thanks!
Replies
Polycount varies a lot from game to game. Characters in an rts are much more low poly than characters in a fighting game, car models in Gran Turismo are much more than cars in Grand Theft Auto. Environments in first person shooters are much higher than environments in a flight sim.
It all depends on what you want to do.
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975
Studios nowadays even hire people trained in sculpting and architecture because they value their art skills more than their ability to meet poly counts - this comes on the job and is project dependent anyway.
There are folios of game artists that have no low poly stuff whatsoever. Although it is good when you can demonstrate techniques used to create game content - i.e. creating normal mapped realtime assets from hi poly stuff. But the polycount itself doesn't matter as much.
Your problem is basically that in the real world assets are made for a specific engine/platform, yet as someone looking for a job you want to target the generic middle ground. How to come up with a good polycount? Look at current AAA games or anything you want your art to match. E.g. look at a closeup of Shepards head in ME3. Keep adding geo to your asset (assuming you model something similar) until it's got the same smoothness in its silhouette. As Rabbid said, focus on defining silhouette and animation features. Whatever the result is your polycount. Did I mention that polycount doesn't matter a lot in folios?
We are still stuck in the XBox360/PS3 world. Modern video cards are 10x more powerful than Xbox360/PS3, still all modern games target first the XBox/PS market, then the PC market.
Addtionally we had a shift in rendering technology in the last decade. From forward rendering to deferred rendering (or any variation of it). This pulls the work from vertex processing and pushed it into pixel processing, that is, you have only a few geometry rendering passes these days and cheaper shaders when rendering the geometry, but lot of post processing steps. As an result, you can easily render more polys with a modern engine than with an older engine.
For the next generation of consoles polycount will not be such an issue, still we will not reach hi-poly niveau. I believe, that the most important skils regarding polycount will be, to create a good,sharp/round looking model, without "wasting" polys.
1st off, polycount is a site not actually a word, yet just like tricount isn't a word, it's tri count. web addresses don't let you have spaces "my awesome site" is "myawesomesite.com". Personally I'm glad they didn't go with poly_count, it is just lame.
2nd, games count triangles not polygons.
[/nerd rant]
I completely agree. If you work smartly your meshes and textures can go lower and run on mobile or they can be run on high end PC hardware and look great.
That doesn't mean all you need are zbrush sculpts you still need to demonstrate that you can unwrap efficiently do materials and layout topology that works for animation but isn't a total waste. If you're off the studio's target tri count by 5,000-10,000 I don't think they'll hold it against you. Of course applying for a cinematic modeling position with only 200 tri models in your portfolio isn't going to get you the job either. So its better to go higher and show it can go down pretty easily.
Triangle counts are pretty specific to the game and their goals. A game could have a lot of environment art they want to show but the characters are minor so all the tris go to environment art or vice versa.
With a lot of places you make high res models and then if needed derive lower poly versions from those models. Either through retopologizing a really high res model or by working in edge loops that can easily be removed to lighten tri counts. Optimization, tweaking and refining to make sure the game is running as best as it can, is normally just part of the process and no one really gets it perfect on day one.
Often models made at the beginning of production get tweaked or updated, sometimes nothing more than because artistic style changed or new tricks where added to newer models. It's not uncommon for triangle counts to range widely over the course of production.
It's easier for texture sheets to scale down than it is up, so you might want to create them larger than what the final game resolution will be. This requires you to pay attention to how your textures will hold up when down res'ing. Watch out for how one pixel lines, text and fine noise, will hold up. It would be good to read up on edge padding and mip maps also, the polycount wiki has some good info about this.
Remember smoothing breaks, UV and material seams can double vert counts along those edges, shaders and other junk can ratchet up the total vert count once in game above what max or maya report as the welded vert count.
I understand all the other stuff, but how do shaders affects vert counts? Stuff like multiple material ids or is it something more complicated?
Depending on how complicated the shader is it can double or triple (or more!) the final vert count, same with adding lots of lights. Of course you might find that it's having almost no impact on the frame rate and there's a bottleneck somewhere else.
If you want more info you will probably have to find someone who actually knows what they are talking about instead of me. :poly142: