Understanding the Ideal Poly-Count.... help !

seandellis

Hi There,

As part of a Uni project we are making an asset pack for an old hospital. The assets we will be modeling are beds, equipment, instruments and that sort of thing.

I've been looking around some websites and forums but can't find a clear answer on what an optimized poly count would be for our assets. I understand it all depends on the platform and the size of the game etc, but I was hoping someone can give me some advice. 

The assets will be made in Maya and placed in Unreal 4. We will be going for a realistic look and using textures from sites like cgtextures.com etc. The intended platform would probably be PC and current gen consoles. 

Thanks guys  

Sean 

AtticusMars

Just don't waste geometry. It's very typical of students to leave a bunch of useless loops in their mesh that are serving absolutely no purpose. Using too much geometry is really not that big of a deal most of the time (at least on a low poly that doesn't have UVs yet) because it is easy to simplify if you need to. What is bad is wasting geo because you're just demonstrating you have no idea what your geometry is actually doing.

Other than that I would say use enough to describe your model with reasonably low faceting at the camera distance it will be most likely viewed.

seandellis

Thanks for your reply... makes sense. So I take it there are no general guidelines in that case like there is for characters. 
I'll take what you said on board when working on the project. 

Dan Powell

Post some pictures of your wireframes as you make progress on the models, and collectively, we can give you tips on where you could remove polygons if it's appropriate.

Atticusmars has touched on the big thing, so all I really have to add is that if something can be well-represented using a normal map, don't bother modelling it in at all. 
 
There's lots of talk of using minimal amounts of geometry, but don't be afraid to put geometry where it's needed. Anything cylindrical or spherical for example needs more polygons to stop it looking jagged, and in 2016, we don't want to be seeing jagged edges really! :P