3D Sentry Drone

spurn

Hey all, working on a sentry drone type bot with current gen console/PC in mind. I've included a concept (older engine ports) and some WIP pieces. The basic gist of this in-game is that it would be a bot you'd have some close contact with (getting in your way and you meleeing it or off in the distance monitoring you). Your main character would be visible (camera above and behind, much like Gears, Assassin's Creed, Web of Shadows etc etc)

My huge issue right now is that while I'm aloting around 10k tris for main characters, I'm not sure how much a bot like this would need, since it's not as robust with limbs and such. I don't want to make it some crazy super machine, since it's purpose is very defined as a "sentry, drone, monitor." OORRRRR would something you'd be interacting with throughout the game, get that same budget anyway?

I really would appreciate some guidance on this, and of course as always, C&C. I hope the insight above helps narrow the focus on the character, but if I can clarify more, let me know.

I haven't optimized geometry at all, it's sitting at 8846tris

crazyfingers

This guy screams for transparencies to me. The caging on him is near paper thin and you wouldn't lose much detail just creating textures to replace the geometry. I'm not sure how familiar you are with normals or baking, but you could create 3 lower poly geosphere, adjust them a bit and get most of you detail into those. One outer shell for the main sheild and the middle one would be your rotors on the sides.

It's the stuff you interact with a lot in a game that needs the most optimization. Every poly and shader you save on these objects is going to increase the overall performance of the game more than less used objects. But of course you want these objects to look better than other stuff too, it goes both ways. Usually important game assets will use a little more resources than other objects but are tweaked to look far better than other more random stuff.

I'd think with a bot like that you probably wouldn't want more than 2k tris or so.

spurn

definitely know how to use normal maps, when i optimize i'll be doing some of those things. a lot of the detailing that isn't show will be done in the high-res/crazybump

2k tris seems low for current gen Xbox360/PS3 though. There wouldn't be 20 of these on screen, maybe 3 or 4 max. 2k tris would still apply?

thanks for the feedback

Zwebbie

Just did a check for you, the Half-Life2 Manhacks are 1200 triangles, Scanners are 1500. I guess next-gen is about twice as many triangles, so 9000 is a bit much.

This might help you save triangles.