Acceptable polycount for props in Next-gen games

loggie24 · Mar 2015

Hi. I have a question. Now that next-gen is fully on, what's the acceptable polycount for props. I'm making an old oil barrel with lots of small detail and sharp edges. Going anything under 1k polys seems unreasonable as i get bake errors. Whats your take on this?

AtticusMars · Mar 2015

It depends on how complex the object is, how large it will be on screen, whether or not it needs additional geometry to blend materials, etc., etc., etc.

That said, if you can't get a cleanly baked barrel out of fewer than 1k triangles then there's probably something wrong with the way you're baking it.

JordanN · Mar 2015

As Atticus said, it's not the polycount, but an error in the baking process. I baked an object with just 24 triangles yesterday and it came out fine.

SuperFranky put together an awesome normal mapping guide. It should help you.

low odor · Mar 2015

The Order: 1886 is pretty next gen I would say...check out some of the wires in these shots(scroll down)...should give you a good idea where the the mesh density is

https://www.artstation.com/artist/nestorcarpintero

https://www.artstation.com/artist/bobbyjrice

JordanN · Mar 2015

Also, since this thread asked about polycount, here's what one guy did with only 1300 triangles.

1000 for an oil barrel should be more than enough. What matters is how do you expect the player to look at it?

If the barrel serves as something important that the player can immediately zoom up on, then it makes sense to have some physical extrusions. If the barrel is far away and mostly out of sight, I would save the triangles and just bake the extrusions into the normal map.

Acceptable polycount for props in Next-gen games

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