Next gen Polycount and so on..
polycounter lvl 8
Since next gen is round the corner, I was wondering what the next gen poly-count and texture resolution size is for general assets and also characters and so on, I'm currently a student so I was thinking it is better to start working at next gen poly-count levels, textures and so on..
Replies
honestly though dont worry about these things tell your working on a game that requires it. enjoy the power to go ballz to the wall crazy in making a asset look as dope as possible. obviously limit yourself in your polycounts but by no means cut polys that affect overall quality. make it look awesome! that's all you should worry about at this point.
Hope that helps
I think on the wiki there is a list of recent games with polycount on characters. I'm sure there is another thread on here that has it listed as well.
Just make good art and keep the polycount reasonable for the goal of the character.
Not quite.
Unfortunately Rendering in 1080p takes a significant amount of juice.
;(
Theres not really that much on an increase, and you are going to be a lot more drawcall bound than you'd think. Verts are heavy for the next generation.
The only other thing I can comment is the step to transition artists into PBR rendering (Physically Based Shading) in newer engines. And improvement in methods for optimization.
On characters, as JacqueChoi mentioned. It definitely depends on whether you use tessellation much or not. Poly budgets are improved by at maximum as I've seen about 15,000 tris extra. But it's still all the same. Just more time for artists to refine their knowledge and speed up the process
Right now, they seem to be capped to 40,000 polygons characters no matter what. Of course, some games go higher than that (Ryse has a 80,000 poly character).
If that doesn't work, tessellation is probably the only way to go but I'm not sure if that will get drained fast. Developers also have to use the 3 tessellation stages to perform other stuff (i.e run hair simulations, displacement mapping etc). Tessellation also has its own problems unfortunately (working with sub-pixels is very taxing).
Hopefully PS5 and the future Xbox have the power to support complete Zbrush assets. That would go a long way justifying those consoles.
As for textures, the new Killzone seems to support 6 2x2k textures per character.
It really does seem like we're hitting diminishing returns as far as polycounts are concerned. With the use of normal and displacement maps becoming commonplace, its hard to imagine a scenario where more than 150k polys would be necessary for a character. Most of the improvements in visual fidelity seem to be coming in the form of physically based lighting and materials combined with enhanced physics and particle effects.
Things like areas lights, physically based shaders, lighting on particals are whats going to define this generation (artistically speaking)
Still dont know a single developer actually using real time tessellation beyond a gimmicky demo here or there, its the same thing with the PS3, tessellation was demoed off for the PS3 and shown that it could work but its SOOOOOO fucking wasteful. Its far superior to have high rez meshes and using a good LOD system than all the issues and lack of any good control that comes with tessellation.
Of the projects we've worked on so far it's true they ended up close to last gen specs but mostly due to overshooting to begin with.
Now that everyone is on final hardware from the start of development we'll begin to see those numbers revised. I wouldn't be surprised if they're significantly revised.