UT3 to show work

scourgewarper

I loaded up DM-Sanctuary in the UT3 editor and checked the scene stats and it stated there were 600k tris in total and 3million instanced tri's with 500k being attributed to the terrain. I am currently making a warhammer themed temple and was wondering what the tri count limit would roughly be on screen at any one time or is it a classic 'well that depends' question?

For the temple which ive blocked out in max typical tri counts for columns and arches are 1k a piece (similar to UT3 asset equivalents) with heavy instancing and the central hall ive sketched would probably have over 100tri's in view at any one time. However the main aim is not to create a playable level (although you can run about in it if you wanted) I guess i'm aiming more to show the individual assets i've made in the unreal engine, making a temple from them is more to show they can be used in a flexible modular fashion. Alternatively I can just make a less complicated temple than the one ive planned to I suppose.

Anyway my aim is to model everything like columns, architecture etc in a modular fashion, build it in UT3 and then light it and take screenshots to showoff my work rather than create a playable level. This is my first piece of work for my portfolio and i'm just looking for some advice/direction.

Vailias

I'd say follow along the UT3 asset densities sizes and you should be ok. Running Deck17 with Nvidia's perfhud on showed over 1million tris in view at times, and averaged between 200-300k. Now I don't think these are all drawn triangles, but at least those handled by the GPU at some point.

Anyway over 100k in view at any given time should work just fine. If I recall the average scene/frame target for UT2k4 was about 120k.

ImSlightlyBored

yeah just keep it a nice amount, not crazy amount if it's going to be instanced much, then build it all
you'll be fine as long as your art is good, then that sort of thing won't matter so much (but definitely keep sensible tri counts!)

ParoXum

I've gone over 250k triangles in the past for a scene (all on the screen) running in a church interior for PS3 (UT3). It ran perfectly.

I guess as long as the instanced content is under 2k triangles per mesh it's almost 'free" to render.

scourgewarper

Wow 120k a frame for UT2K4! Never remember it being that high, as a lot of my on screen tri count will be heavily instanced I guess it should run ok.

I remember reading an article detailing the tradeoff between instancing objects or just combining them into one solid uber mesh, I think the jist was if you have 1000 crates at 12 tri's each scattered around your level then your better off just combining them all as one mesh rather than instancing them, this works up until a certain limit but differs with each engine if I remember-someone can correct me if i've got that wrong but for this scene the main hall will have 80-100 pillars in view at 1k tri's each so i'll leave them instanced.

EarthQuake

One thing that you really have to keep in mind is that 1 million tris, could easily be close to 250,000 tris in your 3d app, but with fancy, multi-pass shaders, lights etc on it. Just because the stats are telling you 1m, its likley a LOT less in terms of budget for modelers. Depending on how the engine works, any asset that is getting hit with multiple lights is probabbly being re-drawn for every light, etc etc etc.

|*BILLY$CLINT*|

scourgewarper wrote: »

I loaded up DM-Sanctuary in the UT3 editor and checked the scene stats and it stated there were 600k tris in total and 3million instanced tri's with 500k being attributed to the terrain. I am currently making a warhammer themed temple and was wondering what the tri count limit would roughly be on screen at any one time or is it a classic 'well that depends' question?

For the temple which ive blocked out in max typical tri counts for columns and arches are 1k a piece (similar to UT3 asset equivalents) with heavy instancing and the central hall ive sketched would probably have over 100tri's in view at any one time. However the main aim is not to create a playable level (although you can run about in it if you wanted) I guess i'm aiming more to show the individual assets i've made in the unreal engine, making a temple from them is more to show they can be used in a flexible modular fashion. Alternatively I can just make a less complicated temple than the one ive planned to I suppose.

Anyway my aim is to model everything like columns, architecture etc in a modular fashion, build it in UT3 and then light it and take screenshots to showoff my work rather than create a playable level. This is my first piece of work for my portfolio and i'm just looking for some advice/direction.

The biggest hitter with UT3 is not the amount of triangles that you have on the screen at one time, it's your material setup and texture size. While triangles do have a cost to render, materials(Usually) cost more due to complexity and texture size.

Remember that for every material ID a mesh has on it, that mesh has to get rendered that many times. So something that has 7 Material ID's gets rendered 7 times, one time for each ID.

sprunghunt

Also if you go to the generic browser in the editor you'll see a statistics tab. This will tell you the amount of polygons in an entire level (not the amount displayed). It also has other helpful info like the number of instances of certain assets or the amount of tris for individual assets.

Vailias

Thankfully UED also has visual feedback for this sort of thing. In the editor viewports there are buttons for "shader complexity" "texture density" and "lighting only" as well as a number of other options.

But those views will give you instant feedback as to where in your level is data intensive. just remember red = complex. Transparent/lucent stuff is almost always into the red simply because it can't be properly computed in the initial deferred shading pass. Look around torlan or any other ut map really, and switch on the shader complexity view mode. The water is bright red, and the little grass clumps too. The trees are green though, probably due to static lighting and other pre-computed stuff.

ImSlightlyBored

make sure you bake lighting before using those views (particularly the shader/light complexity) else everything shows up red or near enough...
I sort of find it takes a real complex shader or a translucent one, to get you to red...