Questions for the pros

slipsius

Ok, so basically since ive been in school, they`ve pushed on us "low poly" for games, while baking in the high poly model. What exactly is low poly in todays standards though? That seems to be a question I never get a straight answer. I know it would depend on how important the model is and what not, but can anyone give rough numbers?

I just saw this on this forums and thought it looked amazing, but is that too high poly for todays games? would they lower the poly count and bake this model into the lower one?
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=62609

Also, if anyone has any baked models with the wire showing, I would love to see them. by the looks of the silhouette of the models people are posting on these forums, they are all high poly renders, so its tough for me to judge.

thanks alot

Stefan

mdeforge

You've never been given a straight answer because it really depends on what platform, engine, and game. Just by googling a little, I found this cgsociety thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=481174 I hope that helps a little.

jocose

The straight answer to your question is that "low poly" is relative to how fast your target system is, and the design of the game your making, and how your model is going to be used. For example if you are making a model that will be duplicated hundreds of time on screen then it may need to be pretty minimal but then again that depends on the target system/game engine.


So the question you are asking just doesn't have enough information in it. If you specify what type of platform your targeting and what type of game your art is going to be made for then we can speculate on what low poly might mean in that situation.

And the model you pointed out was a high-rez model that will probably be used for baking a normal map (its not going to be used in game directly).

Mark Dygert

4 triangles no more no less.

I think Rick tackled this one best with his article, "How Many Polys in a Piece of String".
http://www.rsart.co.uk/2006/11/20/how-many-polygons-in-a-piece-of-string/

Your typical answer to "how many polys" will be it depends on a lot of factors, narrow those factors down and we can begin to talk soft numbers.

slipsius

Stradigos wrote: »

You've never been given a straight answer because it really depends on what platform, engine, and game. Just by googling a little, I found this cgsociety thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=39&t=481174 I hope that helps a little.

that helped ALOT. thanks!

I think its time i go on a hunt to find some meshes of some, what would seem to be, really detailed models.

if anyone has any links of any pics like that, please send them my way.

Zwebbie

I don't know how this works for other people, but as for myself, I always think of the kind of game that I want my model to be in, and then take screenshots or find other kinds of pictures; I model by level of detail rather than polygon count and it works rather well.

The problem with a fixed polygon count is that if you have character X and character Y, if X has two arms and Y has six, you can give X six-sided fingers and Y four-sided fingers. In reality, consistency would look better and you should give them the same fingers, even if that means your six-armed guy ends up with more polygons.

pior

Hi Stefan!!

First off, now that game techs have a lot of variety, the terms lowpoly/highpoly can be quite confusing, even to pros. Like, you do a model to put in a game, and add some extra loops for proper animation and someone walks by your desk and says, Ooh, that's quite highpoly! (meaning : 'dense')

Lowpoly could mean final ingame asset, lowpoly subd cage, model done but UVs not completed ... anything.

SO basically there are two things :
The *ingame* asset, with vertices animated by the engine.
The *source* asset, it can be anything. Polygon count is irrelevant to this mesh (hence Zbrush users bragging about yeah that model is 2million polies how cool is that, are clueless). Very often these source models are made using geometry subdivision techniques, which rely on a cage ... and that cage can look alot like a ingame lowpoly hence the confusion.

In the thread you are referring to, you are looking at a *source* asset. This will never go in a game. It is to be baked to an *ingame*asset, that can range from 500 to 5000 to xxxxxx polies depending on the game engine.

Also many artists take their ingame asset with the baked textures, and render it with a non-realtime renderer. It looks fancy and cool, but is not a representation of what it would look in a game engine so that's kinda misleading (and that's uncool in my opinion :P)

Good luck with everything! Got a few wireframes on my website/signature link, feel free to ask anything.

scourgewarper

Hey pior, when you refer to the 'cage' for subd techniques which I assume is like the zbrush subd system, are you referring to the geometry at the lowest level of subdivision which is usually similar in polycount to the low poly models of games?

pior

http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o127/oglefrogle/1-1.jpg

The subdivision 'cage' is made of the blue lines (imagine then straight instead of slightly curved)

scourgewarper

Ahh right so its the same as the orange cage you get in max when you subdivide gotcha

malcolm

Hi there, the way I tackle this problem is look at the game you are trying to strive for visual quality wise, ie maybe you really like resident evil 5 and then just get some screenshots of that game and use the same amount of detail as they use.