Reasonable Scene Polycount

vpcreis

Well, hi people! this is my first post here!
I'm have some questions about the poly size used this days in games such as "Skyrim" and "The Witcher 2" for exemple. whats the average triangulations in complexe scenes? and thinking about all the environment together, what about the textures and effects(fog, particles and others) in the scene,this effects are measured as polycount? or... it's another cauculation? i really don't know.

Hope you people can help me out !

oobersli

get ahold of an level editor... open some levels and check it out for yourself. there is no set average or standard.

hope that helps you out.

Bibendum

You're not going to find a number that matters much because it really depends on your target platform, engine, what's going on action wise, how much of the scene is visible at any one given time, accounting for all potential characters that will be on screen, etc., etc. And no effects aren't measured as polycounts.

If you're asking because you're concerned the models you're making are too high poly then you're probably looking at this from the wrong perspective. If you understand what good topology looks like, and you aren't blatantly wasting geometry, then you're probably in a good position because it doesn't matter what your polycount is as you can always optimize it. Try not to think in terms of "am I below my poly limit" and more in terms of "Is the silhouette well defined? Can this model be simplified? Do I have geometry that is serving no purpose?"

You could find out what witcher 2/skyrim use but it wouldn't be a useful measuring stick. The best way to figure out what your scene polycount limit is going to be is to take a prototype of your game and stress test it.

vpcreis

@bibendum

Thanks for the advice! im making all stuffs low poly right now for a big scene, with alot of trees, i was just a bit worried because i have no experience doing this right now. but ill focus on good models righ now!

leslievdb

just try to make things look as good as possible with the least amount of triangles, if your object gets closeups or is a big shape in a scene it should get more triangles. if it's in the back somewhere as a filler use a bit less.
Also try to think about the shaders and effects you want to use and what they would cost you in performance. That way you can partly balance out a scene beforehand.

Ghostscape

7

PixelMasher

I always build things so they look great and how I want them to, while just keeping the overall amount of assets in the scene in mind. It really comes down to how it performs on the target platform like others have said. every game I have worked on there has always been an optimization phase after everything is assembled past alpha, to get the frame rate up, because until its all together you really cant know how it will perform. some of the scenes in spacemarine were around a million polies on screen at one time.