What's a good polycount limit for...

Haunted Dustbin

A building asset to be used in game?

First of all, first post!

Secondly, I know you'll need more details than just that.

I'm a bit of a newbie undertaking a new project and I could do with a little help on the more technical side of things. I'm creating a city map for a game built within UDK. It'll be 3rd person so the player will be seeing the assets quite up close. I'm more than comfortable with asset creation, but what's a good polycount limit to aim for with medieval-styled buildings? (That's in-line with the average power of a gaming rig of today). There's shaping up to be around 200-300 houses (Not all visible at once).

As a side question: Texturing is my shameful, shameful weakness. I've been rolling with 1024x1024 UV Maps for the buildings. I know that smaller is better but for assets as large as them is it recommended to bump up to 2056x2056?

ZacD

You mean 2048x2048.
Actually 3rd person games require less detail than first person, 1024x1024 would be near the high end for current consoles, you should be able to get away with 1024x512 or smaller for non-key buildings, but if you are sharing texture sheets well you can get away with bigger textures. 4-10k tris should be fine depending on how crazy you get with the detail.

http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade

Haunted Dustbin

Haw~ how embarrassing. I always get the resolutions wrong, I usually keep a calculator on stand by to compensate for my horrible, horrible math while tired.

Thanks for the reply man! I was -well- under that polycount, which is good as I find it much easier to add polygons rather than take them away. I had a couple of buildings floating around the 606 tris mark. I'm thinking I was a little too reserved with the detail.

PhattyEwok

I think generally unless you go crazy with poly limit like 100-300k and above you can get away with a lot of geometry. What it really comes down to is modularity and smart use of textures. IE can you take a Building and then kit bash that thing into 3 more buildings using some UV tweaking, vertex shading and shader based changes without having a major buttload of textures and in turn more draw calls.