Question about polygon count for realtime character portfolio

EKDD

Hello, polycount. I am an aspiring realtime character artist and working on my portfolio piece.

Right now, I just finished retopoing the whole character, ended up with around 225k tris including haircards. My question is how many tris are acceptable for a portfolio piece? I did the retopo using quadraw and it took me more than 2 weeks actually and I don't feel like I can do it all over again, but seems like I have to because it is too much tris.. or at least more work on optimizing the one I have.  But wanted to know before jumping into another retopo process.

And one more question, is it normal to take this long to retopo the character?? I am not sure but I don't think it is and it was really tedious process. I guess I should have taken this process into account while I was at the high poly stage so I had high poly that would be much easier to retopo or get by with some remesh..? Anyway, really curious how long it normally takes in the production or other students making portfolios.  

Thanks you, have a good weekend!!

JohannesAg

All those answers really really depend on the character, could you post some screenshots of your work, including wireframes?
That being said 225 k is a little high, it´s not uncommon now to have 150 k or more for a main cast character tho. But for personal stuff it´s usually okay to push things a bit,
Also don´t zremesh stuff.

EKDD

@JohannesAg Thanks for the reply. So it doesn't have to be strictly around 100k as far as I understand, which is awesome to know! 

I am updating my current progress, hopefully I can get some more critique. I am actually concerned that I will be facing a lot of bake issues because this whole retopo process was done for the first time without knowing baking well. I just did the retopo and planed to think about bake process later when I face it which is now... 

Anyway, here are my current stage and highpoly shots. Thanks for looking, have a good one.

JohannesAg

okay I think a huge reason for this polycount is probably the small things, for example like the ropes that wrap around the arms I would personally have baked those down and kept them in the normal map instead of geometry. The buckles also look more dense than I think they need to be.  Watch out for the small stuff, it can add up to a lot.
You can def terminate a lot of edge loops on the hard surface parts, loops that just run over a flat shape are pretty pointless, I highlighted some of them in red to show you what I mean. You could definitely collapse a lot of edges on this and it wouldn´t look or bake any different.
oh and the blanket thing on his back is twice as dense as the body so you could probably reduce that quite a bit if you wanted to optimize.

EKDD

@JohannesAg Thanks for the reply, It really means a lot for me. I have a question about the rope on the arm, as far as I understand, in a common situation, I can get away with just one cylinder and bake on it? 

JohannesAg

you could try that yeah. I tend to try stuff and do bake tests as I go to figure out what I can get away with. You could probably also bake it into the arm if you accomodate for it in the topo.

EKDD

@JohannesAg Oh okay, it is usually case by case from experience. I will try more optimize. thank you!! 

EKDD

Hello guys, here are some of my update. I am done with retopo and tri count is now around 120k thanks to JohannesAg and have been doing baking.  






I can definitely see some errors here and there, so I will go back to fix it. But... the reason I update now is actually I am having a question about baking this piece.



The surface part is fine just using regular baking, but the problem is the inner part. 
I have tried multiple ways I could think of, that is making this blanket flat mesh using transfer attribute in Maya, so I could bake the inner part. But that transfer trick make all the fine details flat too, so I couldn't use it as high poly. Anyone has any idea how to bake the inside part of this rolled up blanket??