Next gen Polycount and so on..

Ryandec

Since next gen is round the corner, I was wondering what the next gen poly-count and texture resolution size is for general assets and also characters and so on, I'm currently a student so I was thinking it is better to start working at next gen poly-count levels, textures and so on..

DInusty

From my experience working on Forza 5 polycounts didnt change all that much but textures went a step up. so if u would be a 512 go ahead and make it a 1024 now. I cant speak for characters but id imagine they have a bit of a higher poly budget.

honestly though dont worry about these things tell your working on a game that requires it. enjoy the power to go ballz to the wall crazy in making a asset look as dope as possible. obviously limit yourself in your polycounts but by no means cut polys that affect overall quality. make it look awesome! that's all you should worry about at this point.

Hope that helps

spiderDude

It all depends on the game honestly. So it will still be anywhere from 2k to 45k tris(The extremely high count being for main character).

I think on the wiki there is a list of recent games with polycount on characters. I'm sure there is another thread on here that has it listed as well.

Just make good art and keep the polycount reasonable for the goal of the character.

Ryandec

Thanks for the post it clears up the thoughts I had on next gen, I was kinda of thinking the polycount would be higher for actual assets but I guess it makes sense that the texture resolution would be higher instead btw your portfolio looks awesome..

JacqueChoi

Depending if you use a tesellation pipeline, it could be significantly less with much more 'rounded' results.

ZacD

There's a lot more memory to play with, 16x as much, so it's going to be a bit more than just x4 a large of textures.

JacqueChoi

ZacD wrote: »

There's a lot more memory to play with, 16x as much, so it's going to be a bit more than just x4 a large of textures.

Not quite.

Unfortunately Rendering in 1080p takes a significant amount of juice.


;(

ZacD

I meant we'll see more types of textures, and more use of detail textures.

DInusty

yeah the moment you go 1080p and want fps of 60 your back to last gen.. haha

Rick Stirling

ZacD wrote: »

There's a lot more memory to play with, 16x as much, so it's going to be a bit more than just x4 a large of textures.

Theres not really that much on an increase, and you are going to be a lot more drawcall bound than you'd think. Verts are heavy for the next generation.

CrazyMatt

like everyone has said above ^
The only other thing I can comment is the step to transition artists into PBR rendering (Physically Based Shading) in newer engines. And improvement in methods for optimization.

On characters, as JacqueChoi mentioned. It definitely depends on whether you use tessellation much or not. Poly budgets are improved by at maximum as I've seen about 15,000 tris extra. But it's still all the same. Just more time for artists to refine their knowledge and speed up the process

JordanN

I think next gen needs new engines for better polycounts.

Right now, they seem to be capped to 40,000 polygons characters no matter what. Of course, some games go higher than that (Ryse has a 80,000 poly character).

If that doesn't work, tessellation is probably the only way to go but I'm not sure if that will get drained fast. Developers also have to use the 3 tessellation stages to perform other stuff (i.e run hair simulations, displacement mapping etc). Tessellation also has its own problems unfortunately (working with sub-pixels is very taxing).

Hopefully PS5 and the future Xbox have the power to support complete Zbrush assets. That would go a long way justifying those consoles.

As for textures, the new Killzone seems to support 6 2x2k textures per character.

JohnnyRaptor

another thing that will raise the bar on next gen that isnt triangle count and texture resolution related is more advanced shaders, lighting and things like dynamic cloth, physics and particles.

3devo

More green and black and greentooth? oh wait i misread the title.

crazyfool

Ryse original characters were 150k before optimisation. That's probably the highest it needs to go on hero assets, all depends on engine and type of game really, but can literally be anything from 20-150k.

Equanim

If anyone wants a laugh, go back and play a launch title from the last generation, like Uncharted 1 or Perfect Dark... relatively speaking, that's where we are again.

Brandon.LaFrance

crazyfool wrote: »

Ryse original characters were 150k before optimisation. That's probably the highest it needs to go on hero assets, all depends on engine and type of game really, but can literally be anything from 20-150k.

It really does seem like we're hitting diminishing returns as far as polycounts are concerned. With the use of normal and displacement maps becoming commonplace, its hard to imagine a scenario where more than 150k polys would be necessary for a character. Most of the improvements in visual fidelity seem to be coming in the form of physically based lighting and materials combined with enhanced physics and particle effects.

Autocon

Polycounts roughly the same. Shader cycles will increase dramatically and texture sizes will increase from 512 standard to 1024. But you are still stuck with the same limitations on texture streaming. So now you have bigger textures but your streaming remains the same. And with things like Play Go on the PS4 its just going to be more of an issue to try and stream and load all those textures into memory without having loading screens.

Things like areas lights, physically based shaders, lighting on particals are whats going to define this generation (artistically speaking)

Still dont know a single developer actually using real time tessellation beyond a gimmicky demo here or there, its the same thing with the PS3, tessellation was demoed off for the PS3 and shown that it could work but its SOOOOOO fucking wasteful. Its far superior to have high rez meshes and using a good LOD system than all the issues and lack of any good control that comes with tessellation.

okkun

It's a little early to say where it's going to end up as always.

Of the projects we've worked on so far it's true they ended up close to last gen specs but mostly due to overshooting to begin with.

Now that everyone is on final hardware from the start of development we'll begin to see those numbers revised. I wouldn't be surprised if they're significantly revised.