How much low poly is good Enough?? (updated)

roshankarel

this is a very simple spherical robot now it has 8500 tris and it can get more low but the difficulty I always face is how to low poly spherical shape and cylindrical shape cause if it too low then facet edges will be visible and will be prominent in texturing part so how to low poly these types 
one more question how to figure out the poly budget or estimate the tris of any model?

oglu

That depends on the platform and on the game. Many factors come into play. How many assets are on screen and so on.
Do some resarch on similar games.

icegodofhungary

There is no single mathematical formula for polygon budget. It depends on the project. A robot in a Ratchet and Clank reboot will be different than a robot in Titanfall. You would have to look up their character art to determine how much you should be using. If you're just doing stuff for a portfolio, there are still some guidelines you can use.

Silhouette matters most. It communicates lots of info about your character. It's something players will notice first. Use enough polygons to get that right. No matter what your budget is, silhouette is a priority.

Put small details into normal maps. You modeled a seam/panel line on your robot's arm socket ball. That should go into a texture. Panel lines, seams, screws, bolts, any small detail like that. There can be exceptions but again, it depends on the project.

Pay attention to polygon density. If you're modeling something small like a character's foot, and there's a tiny cylinder in the ankle joint or something, the cylinder probably doesn't need 64 sides. From the camera's distance, it would probably read just as well being 8-16 sides. Especially with a good normal map over it. Small objects, and objects that take up a tiny amount of screen space don't need as many polygons. Larger things and things that take up more screen space do. You have a lot of density in the torus-like part of your robot's arm socket. It's not needed for such a small part of the robot. That torus could probably be 8 sides on the axis and maybe 16-32 sides on the circumference. It would read fine.

Ask yourself if an edgeloop is working. Is it supporting something or adding to the silhouette? If not, it can probably be removed. For example, there's an edgeloop on the wall of the cylindrical shape cut into the robot's body. It's not supporting anything, the wall is flat. It's not adding to the shape of it in any way. It can probably be removed. Same thing for the edgeloops on the straight part of the arm. If its arm is just a rectangular bar, with no curvature or anything, then you don't need all those extra loops. Only use what you need.

I would say that if this robot is meant for a third person game, and it's meant to be stylized, then your probably want the whole character to be around 10k. I'm not sure how much more detail you were going to add to everything. For example:

Has lots of stuff like panels, tubes, bars, for its limbs. So it's probably higher poly than

Who has straight bars for arms/legs and simple cylindrical joints.

The good news is that you can usually find extracted 3D models of characters, especially valve games, and look at them yourself. So I suggest finding a 3D model of Atlas from Portal 2 to get an idea of the poly count.

roshankarel

icegodofhungary said:

There is no single mathematical formula for polygon budget. It depends on the project. A robot in a Ratchet and Clank reboot will be different than a robot in Titanfall. You would have to look up their character art to determine how much you should be using. If you're just doing stuff for a portfolio, there are still some guidelines you can use.

Silhouette matters most. It communicates lots of info about your character. It's something players will notice first. Use enough polygons to get that right. No matter what your budget is, silhouette is a priority.

Put small details into normal maps. You modeled a seam/panel line on your robot's arm socket ball. That should go into a texture. Panel lines, seams, screws, bolts, any small detail like that. There can be exceptions but again, it depends on the project.

Pay attention to polygon density. If you're modeling something small like a character's foot, and there's a tiny cylinder in the ankle joint or something, the cylinder probably doesn't need 64 sides. From the camera's distance, it would probably read just as well being 8-16 sides. Especially with a good normal map over it. Small objects, and objects that take up a tiny amount of screen space don't need as many polygons. Larger things and things that take up more screen space do. You have a lot of density in the torus-like part of your robot's arm socket. It's not needed for such a small part of the robot. That torus could probably be 8 sides on the axis and maybe 16-32 sides on the circumference. It would read fine.

Ask yourself if an edgeloop is working. Is it supporting something or adding to the silhouette? If not, it can probably be removed. For example, there's an edgeloop on the wall of the cylindrical shape cut into the robot's body. It's not supporting anything, the wall is flat. It's not adding to the shape of it in any way. It can probably be removed. Same thing for the edgeloops on the straight part of the arm. If its arm is just a rectangular bar, with no curvature or anything, then you don't need all those extra loops. Only use what you need.

I would say that if this robot is meant for a third person game, and it's meant to be stylized, then your probably want the whole character to be around 10k. I'm not sure how much more detail you were going to add to everything. For example:

Has lots of stuff like panels, tubes, bars, for its limbs. So it's probably higher poly than

Who has straight bars for arms/legs and simple cylindrical joints.

The good news is that you can usually find extracted 3D models of characters, especially valve games, and look at them yourself. So I suggest finding a 3D model of Atlas from Portal 2 to get an idea of the poly count.

Thank you so much for this elaborated answer this cleared  lots of doubt 

HAWK12HT

I would suggest look into Vehicle art for games (wireframes) the general guide for curved surfaces is that add enough tris for smooth curves and then terminate the loops somewhere they dont affect the shading (flat area mostly or even on curved area as long as you dont see artifacts in shading) Usually for vehicles from NFS series 5 years ago was around 25K including the driver (check out Speedhunters article on cars of need for speed). 

In the end it all come down to like what others said, depends on your game and budget of tris set by tech leads. Another good example to check would be Alien Isolation art dump. 

roshankarel

This is how it turned out pretty basic but let me know
posing and final rendering to be done!!

Kanni3d

Silhouette looks fine, but without the wireframe, we can't help/critique if you've adopted any of the above advice into your work.

poopipe

Tricount isn't one static figure for an asset.

On most modern hardware you can throw 10million tris at a prop and it isn't a problem as long as its covering most of the screen. 
The shit hits the fan when you have 5000 assets on screen and they're not lodded. 

Anyway, 
The correct number of triangles is the minimum number required to achieve the shape you're looking for at the current view distance. Anything smaller than a pixel is redundant (also disproportionately expensive to render) and should be eliminated for that lod.