Ballpark Triangle Figures for Strategy games?
Hello lovely people, this is my first post here. I'm an aspiring developer with a variety of prior experience, but it's been about 6-8 years since i last did 3D art for a game, in some Civ IV mods. Since then i've been a little out of touch and mostly focusing on coding.
Currently, I am interested in making a strategy game in unreal engine. I won't bore you with too many details, but i'm planning to do most of the work myself, art included. I'm brushing the dust off my old talents and firing up the latest version of blender, and I've realised I don't really have targets for performance yet.
I'm interested in making unit models with around the same detail level as the Total War series, examples:
I'm posting on polycount because I found this place while trying to google performance stats for the latest Total War Warhammer game, (along with a nice thread where various artists were posting their official work, it was lovely!)
I flatter myself thinking i can emulate that quality, but I'll do my best. I need some ideas on targets though. That is, polycounts, and texture sizes. I'm used to working within tight limits, and I need to set such limits for myself so i don't run away spending a million triangles on an exquisitely sculpted nose or somesuch. But these days i have no idea what modern computers are capable of
So my question is:
For an average human figure, in armor or clothing, viewed from a sort of isometric perspective and in the context of a strategy game developed for modern gaming PCs:
What's a good target for his polycount (in triangles) and resolution for textures, normal maps, glow, gloss, etc.
Once I have target values for humanoids, I can use that as a baseline for performance targets for other things (like guys on horseback)
Any posts and thoughts are appreciated
Replies
Design the unit without restricting yourself, place it as close to the camera as it'll ever get in game and start reducing geometry and texel density - stop reducing when it starts to become visible to the player and you have your answer.
Modern consoles can draw millions of triangles on screen without breaking a sweat - materials are the biggest cost
The hardware the game is running on? Mobile? Console? PC?
The engine it's using and how well it handles optimization? Do you need to micro manage the Levels of Detail or does it handle it for you? The time it takes to create assets is also a huge factor.
The overall design of the game? How many units are on the screen at one time? How close will the camera get? Will the same models be used for in-game cut scenes or cinematics?
Do the designers have a rough idea how many units will be on the screen? Will one character represent hundreds like the Civilization games or does every character need to live and die on their own?
What are the actions they preform, how many animations are needed, how many joints in the rig? How long does it take to create a character and rig it up, how many do you need to have? 7 recycled units or a hundred unique characters?
Are they just low poly models with simple textures, or will there be complex materials that need to be derived from normal maps meaning there will be a high poly -> low poly workflow.
How important are other aspects of the game, like the environment, AI, particles, back end systems?
Often the tri count is heavily dependent on testing and performance balancing as you go. What you trim back in one game to give another aspect more impact, won't be the same as another game.
If I had to take a wild stab in the dark I would start testing with quickly done stand in models that start at roughly 20k tris and see how things preformed, making sure the rest of the game had more or less equivalent stand-ins. Keeping in mind that there might be a large optimization push again later.