Should every mesh you make be high poly?

kevingamerartist

Hi All,
One more question I have about high poly and low poly mesh.

Should everything you create be made high poly, or only certain mesh objects be high poly, and then everything else be low poly?

Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated, thank you!

musashidan

No, everything doesn't have to be highpoly. High poly is just for baking. So if you want to capture detail and silhouette edges to a normal map you'll need a highpoly. Unless of course you just create a chamfered lowpoly and add the normal details in something like NDO or Substance.

I recently heard David Lesperance(well known environment artist) say he doesn't ever create a highpoly and just models the lowpoly with chamfering. 

It depends a lot of things: the target platform, the purpose of the asset, the importance of the asset, the game style, the workflow within a team. If you're just learning this stuff then create the high poly purely for the experience and practice, if nothing else.

Steppenwolf

You can do a lot without hipolies and instead use material atlases and custom vertex normals. Take a look at Alien: Isolation or some recent Assassins Creed games for instance.

Synaesthesia

I generally don't make high-poly models unless absolutely required. The details I want can be added with NDO or modeled in directly. Aligning vert normals can go a long way toward improving shading without a bake as well.