Low/High Poly Questions

Screamheart

Questions for gamedev:

1.) I made the inside of the piano with all of the complex parts so that it could be opened and seen. That tripled my poly count and I'm looking at 16,000 faces now. Should I reconsider including the insides, or gut it enough so that it's not even close to being accurate to a real piano, or leave it as it is?

2.) What is the industry best practice for moving this into Substance Painter and baking a high poly onto it? Do I have to combine this all into one mesh? Should I make 1 mesh for each material type (metal, wood, etc)? While I'm at it, should each material be on a different UDIM space or everything in 0-1 UV space?

oglu

Is this for a game? Which one?
Just for fun?

Cause i wont use normalmaps on this one. Only for details. Model the asset with around 100-200k poly. 
Thats fine for realtime asset if there isnt a real game around.

Cars in Games does have up to 1mio poly in the showroom. And use only normalmaps for detailmaps.

So it depends on your needs. Tell us more.

Screamheart

oglu said:

Is this for a game? Which one?
Just for fun?

Cause i wont use normalmaps on this one. Only for details. Model the asset with around 100-200k poly. 
Thats fine for realtime asset if there isnt a real game around.

Cars in Games does have up to 1mio poly in the showroom. And use only normalmaps for detailmaps.

So it depends on your needs. Tell us more.

Thanks for the response. This is for my portfolio and it's only one asset that will be in a full scene. I plan to take it into Unreal and have space for a character to walk around. I'm wanting to make it in the best way possible to show that I know what I'm doing, so I want to keep the polycount low and the topology neat. So you would suggest only using normals for certain things that need it? I had considered originally making a high model for everything to add bevel on the edges.

Do I combine everything to one low poly mesh? Or do I make a different mesh for each piece or material type?

Kanni3d

One mesh, with multiple material ids is all you need.

Making multiple meshes is not only unnecessary on performance (which doesn't matter in this case) but just a pain to have a single static object have multiple pieces that you have to "build" in engine.

Screamheart

Kanni3d said:

One mesh, with multiple material ids is all you need.

Making multiple meshes is not only unnecessary on performance (which doesn't matter in this case) but just a pain to have a single static object have multiple pieces that you have to "build" in engine.

Thanks. I have done IDs before for in-game character customization. I wasn't sure if combining into one mesh would cause material bleeding for anything that is touching each other. So I take it only merged edges/verts will allow the textures to bleed over even if 2 polygons intersect?

Kanni3d

There wouldn't be any sort of bleeding, as their uv's (and corresponding materials/textures) are completely non-respective of eachother. Should be totally fine to select elements/faces, have a seperate material ID for them, and import into engine without artifacting 

sprunghunt

For unreal don't make multiple materials it's a waste of performance. You were on the right track using substance painter. 

if it's a game asset you should try to make all the polygons not go below a certain size. Instead of using polygons for small details use texturing instead. 

This means I wouldn't model in the bolt things on the top. I wouldn't model the strings - I'd try to make the interior simpler by using baked textures instead of geometry. I wouldn't even make the white keys as separate meshes - just use a texture. 

You can use your existing model as a hipoly with a few extra details. I'd think about exploding the mesh to bake it - or separate it into different hipoly files.