Question: Topology and polycount?

onewinged

Hi guys I'm doing research about topology and how the amount of polygons affects a model positively and negatively for a school project at the moment and I have some questions.


To start this up I'm trying to find information about topology for props but I can't really find much information about it, there is more about characters. But it seems like a lot of the rules applies to props as well. So I would like to ask what you guys know about prop specific topology?


And when it come to the polycount I would like to know if we take Beyond Two Souls main characters for example that is about 30,000 polys (I think?) or any other main character. Would this 30.000+ poly characters still be called a lowpoly mesh or does it have some other name?

ZacD

If a prop doesn't deform, the rules are pretty simple.

Use most of the geometry for stuff that effects the silhouette. Avoid very long and skinny triangles. Pay attention to smoothing groups, if you aren't using a work flow with synced normal map tangents, you might need to use control loops. If you are using vertex painting or tessellation, you want the geometry to be very square and evenly spaced. Also know your target engine, and what counts as a draw call, sometimes you can have floating geometry not count as a separate draw call, sometimes it needs to be one mesh. Your topology might be some what affected by how you are going to UV and texture the object, pay attention to that.

30k+ polycount characters are still called a lowpoly mesh.

Bruno Afonseca

Topology for props is not THAT much of a delicate issue like characters since they don't animate and deform. It's more about normal mapping and shading, you might need some support edges here and there to prevent skewing on normal map details, and avoid having very long and thin triangles since those might shade terribly. It really depends on the engine though

This should explain a bit: http://wiki.polycount.com/PolygonCount