Just what is high poly and low poly nowadays?

JeremyaRandall

Its game job hiring season and I am looking to make both a low poly and high poly reel, thing is in the listings they mention just the name high and low for a poly count whats a good number for low and for high? I went to school back in the day when high poly was around 1.5k now I imagine with normal mapping its in the millions no doubt, and I just signed on to a 40k mod and this monster thats gonna be running around in the dawn of war game and they want around 4k for the polys, that seems astronomical for a low poly count. whats your take on low and high polycounts? thanks.

lkraan

I assume that your question is focussed on next gen PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. PSP and DS obviously have completely different specs and possibilities.

I imagine that for next gen games the specs depend on the engine and type of game.
For instance Quake4 uses about 3000 polys for characters and maximum 2048x2048 textures. The limitations for the high poly mesh are I guess the amount of detail that will still render visible in a 1024x1024 texture. This is not bound to a X amount of polys.

JKMakowka

My rought estimation is, everything below 10k is lowpoly, and anything you subdivide, zbrush etc is highpoly.
But Ikraan is absolutly right about the different platforms.

KDR_11k

Hipoly is anything that has no poly limit. Lowpoly can mean either for realtime (game) use or way below average realtime specs.

JeremyaRandall

Thanks guys!

Toomas

[ QUOTE ]
Hipoly is anything that has no poly limit. Lowpoly can mean either for realtime (game) use or way below average realtime specs.

[/ QUOTE ]

So there is no high poly by your definition.

JordanW

I'll have to disagree about high poly having no limit. Even if you're doing work for movies you have to be smart about how you make your models. You cant just go throwing millions of polies into a scene you wont be able to work on it. My suggestion is if you're going to make some 'high poly' assets you should look into using displacement maps and interesting shader setups that arent typically available in games.

JKMakowka

But for nomalmaps is is basicly unlimited (or only restricted by the texture resolution) as render times don't really play a role.

JordanW

Again, I disagree, i dont think you should say that because you cant go all willy nilly on making stuff without making it in a smart way. Whether you're using layers, hiding shit or not you still have to make things in a smart way. Technically there is no hard set limit, there never has been...for anything. But if you dont want max crashing on you at random points, and you want to be able to actually work on your assets you still need to be concious of the polycounts and how you're handling them, even if they are in the millions.

Eric Chadwick

I concurr with the tinman.

The normalmap-extractor usually can only handle N number of vertices. More verts than needed usually means slower load/save, longer network times, more disk space, slower rendering, etc. It all adds up.

EarthQuake

You model your highres with some idea of the texture resolution you want, you would never need to say, use 32 sided sub-d cylinders if you're mapping onto a 256. The lower your texture res the less detail you can get away with modeling. Polycount on high res models is indeed a non-factor but you definately do need to consider which details will actually show up in your normals map.

Toomas

So polycount is not a factor huh?
Try this:
make a cube, and start subdividing it, see how high you can go before it gets impossible to do anything.

Eric Chadwick

I think the point was that there is no "set" limit, as opposed to realtime models.

For highpoly the limit is variable, limited by your studio's workflow and the studio machines' performance.

JeremyaRandall, it's nice for someone to hear how many polys the highpoly model is, but the real test is in the quality of the maps that come out of it.