Looking for advice for Game optimization
Hey all, Currently working on a project that is a pretty high poly count, right now, I'm a bit clueless when it comes to optimization and what my poly count should be, I am looking to be a prop artist, I am currently thinking of having 2 LoDs of this prop, one for use within an environment and one for use by the player, what are some of the steps I should take on fixing this model up for use within games!
In the background was my attempted version of optimizing however I have quickly realized that I'm not sure if I am going in the right direction. Thank you for any critique/help with this!
PS. if anything I am definitely going to bake a lot of the detail that is in the knobs for the dials and buttons as that seem to be details that I would want a normal map for instead of geometry
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The main thing is silhouette. Anything that doesn't contribute to the silhouette of the mesh, or is required for a clean normal bake, is wasteful. Things like the textured nubs of the lens focus ring, or any of the cylindrical shapes you have, are pretty wasteful of an ingame asset. Even as a first person asset, there's a lot of wasted geo here. I could see it being okay if it were like an inspectable item, where you can zoom all the way into the nooks and crannies, but in general, there's a fair amount of cleanup to be done here, IMO.
For a first-person asset of this size, I don't think you'd need more than 5-6k tris, but that could vary on it's specific use and functionality ingame. Could be a bit more or less. For a 3rd person external model, You could probably get away with 300-500 tri's at most. Most of the detail could be baked to a simplified box mesh, and way lower res cylinders.
I would say the Cylinders were the only thing I felt I had a clear idea of, as one of the little turn dials was around 4k Tris, and with such little detail, I could easily bake it into a normal map. When attempting to bake The Camera body from high poly into low poly, I got some pretty ugly results. This was caused by my low poly mesh not quite matching up with the subdivided silhouette, which will be an easy fix. Thank you so much for including a Tri count. I often see conflicting things when looking up poly counts in different game objects, giving me a clear goal to work towards. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my post and help me out with this problem, as this was just frustrating me from either overcomplicating things or not going through things the right way.
no worries! Polycounts always vary, so it's not a set-fast rule. It's dependent on zone/game performance and other factors. But as a "rough" goal, it's something to at least shoot for.