Weapon polycount?
Hi people
I am about to begin work on some weapons, but I was wondering if any one knows the polycount for weapons (typically assault rifles) in first person games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 etc?
I have done a bit of research and all I can find is numbers for CounterStrike, which is around 2000, but since it is quite old I expect it would be higher for the previously mentioned games
Thanks loads!
I am about to begin work on some weapons, but I was wondering if any one knows the polycount for weapons (typically assault rifles) in first person games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 etc?
I have done a bit of research and all I can find is numbers for CounterStrike, which is around 2000, but since it is quite old I expect it would be higher for the previously mentioned games
Thanks loads!
Replies
Games like COD, Halo, or TF2... what's the polycount like for average handheld weapons on those?
Also try to study those games from a visual standpoint and not just number comparison ways. If you look close you can often see how the polygon flow is - or even better fire up their editors and load the models to see the real triangles.
This is often way better to get a feel for the polycount as just pure numbers.
Polycount is an art board. There is only one. It is not normally involved with the production of weapons for commercial titles. So how many polycounts are in those weapons? Probably none.
Poly count is the total number of polys in a 3D object. BTW count triangles not polys.
How many polys in a piece of string is a good read and a good way to understand why people don't automatically regurgitate hard numbers.
The only real way to know for sure is to:
A) Be the artist and remember.
C) Honestly its more work for me to go dig up all that info and post soft numbers and its all something you could/should probably be doing if you really want to know...
For a third person shooter I'd cut that down to 500-5,000 depending on the size and complexity of the weapon.
Optimum for the Source Engine is 1500 triangles.
Why is that the optimum?
They must've done it for a reason, hence most people aim to make it at 1500.
I think it's simply the budget that the modeller was given but, regardless, it's the same budget I use.
This was pretty much my thought - I could swear I had read on a a source SDK wiki that most of the HL2 weapons were between 4 and 7k.
There is no reason for an FPS weapon to be that low. That's lower than a number of the third person weapons I've made
Only the left half of the gun is modelled and hence we get the number 3000.
Sure the engine can cope with a lot more, but it's nice when all the weapon models you make for an engine lie at the same poly count.
I guess I'm having problems letting go :P
It's such a stable and neat Engine, my favourite. I don't want to accept that it's out of date!
Make it look good. Prove you can do the whole baking, texturing, etc. workflow down, and if it's 1k tris or 5k tris will matter less and less.
Pick a target game type, and model accordingly. (FPS, RTS, MMO, etc.) But don't kill yourself with limitations. Prove you can do it first, then let the studio tell you how it should be.
Alternatively you could reduce some polygons from the characters or other objects to put them into the guns - it really depends.
Thanks!
I think that it more depends on the texture size. So a 4K Texture will lower the Frames much more then +20k Triangles Geometry. There are often Attachements on weapons which have his own Texturemaps. So for example 4k for the weapon and 2k for the attachements. And i think that these combinations are the biggest frame eater ^^