Now an extremely serious and worthwhile thread

I'd like an answer without having to google cause that would be too easy.

Is there anyone here qualified to tell me generally the right amount of polys, in a typical pbr setup (In unity terms, typically), for the highest detail LOD in a modern game that will never be on a mobile and laughs at mobiles. I don't really want to hear 'it depends' because I know it can depend, but take any recent ps4 first/third person action game a la infamous 2 or killzone 4 (Not that I intend to go anywhere near a ps4 at the moment)

I'm decimating something and it's hurting a little so I want to read a high number

 

Thats a good question, i just reread my post and realised i hadnt even said what of

Major NPC in an environment of around 5-7 such NPCs, bias towards NPC detail over environment detail, mid to high end win/mac/linux pc (I'd not want much less than my 580 to try, for eg, but no compute for the time being until Unity has something that doesnt only work on windows)

 

I can say that I recently read they use 50 - 60K per character in those environments now. I don't actually know if those environments are technically capable of more though.

 

That seems reasonable, especially cause i think i can do 50k and it not hurt too much. I do rather wish Unity 5 upon us though.. i should probably read up on Unity 5, i don't even know if it'll have anything other than direct compute, and i think it's perfectly reasonable to expect tesselation, for example, to be a status quo on everything rather than developers forever hiding behind dx9

 

Well my computer can't even do tessellation.

The new toy I wanted all this time and was too dumb to know is behavior trees. Well I can get that now for $200 but I'm still looking forward to Unity 5.

 

We have around 30 NPC's in a scene that vary between 15K - 20K polys (Bar the main char, 65K).. All runs sweetly!.

 

Personally I would keep it around 30k - 40k for flexibility in building of environment detail on top and such... fx, lighting, etc... PBR should run okay really, I think the biggest issue along those lines would more likely be how many higher res maps you use, any extra fancy reflections, stuff like that. Standard PBR shouldn't burden so much that you had to reduce the polycounts to compensate. We're talking about top hardware today, which is average hardware on a published game by the time you build at this level anyway, so shoot for the moon and don't worry about it.

I wish U5 would be here already too. There isn't really much to read up on about it either.

 

The game itself shouldn't take too long to make, its mean to be for a comp but its hard seeing me hit the deadline, but still, its more a showcase than a big beefy game. If theres's 30 30k npcs mooching around and its peachy i'll be generous then, cheers!

 

Seriously, this thread title sucks.

 

Thread title should be changed.

Also, your question is ambiguous. Why would a street sign have the same polys as a main character? How many models on screen at once?

If you want a specific answer, you should probably ask a specific question .

How many polys should a human character be?

How many polys should a tank/mech be?


Those are much easier to answer.

 

The threads were getting silly, so this was a fairly light almost-silly contribution, sorry if it offended your sensibilities

And to be honest, yes I know full well 'it depends', i assume an npc isnt usually a tank though, and a vague question can get a vague answer, fine by me. Carry on though, this is a videogames development gossip forum, keep it badass guys...

 

I would have destroyed you with my iron fist of silliness if you laid one finger on my threads

 

Stop suggesting that. It doesn't even work to change the thread title. Yes, you can edit it by editing the first post, and it shows the title when you're reading that particular thread. But back on the "forum view" where you see all threads, it never updates from the old thread name. Unless they've changed this recently.

Probably none of you are aware of this. I've tried it. It doesn't work.

 

And I will say to you also, changing the thread title simply does not work. Unless you have powers that the author of the thread does not (see my previous post right above this for why / how it doesn't work).

 

I would hope a moderator would have the powers to change something as simple as a title . If you're trying to point out how this forum has such poor features and bugs. There are rumors of a new forum engine being worked on, let's hope it won't be take as long as a new version of Unity

 

They not be able to change thread title, but are able to remove the source of problem, the title creator

 

That's pretty hurtful and I hope you take it back

(Also, banned for a silly thread, that would take the biscuit)

Now i'm pretty upset my thread title was changed too, it was serious business

 

There is a furrow in my brow akin to thundering clouds on the horizon, the dark star has aligned, the blood tide has come

 

Well somehow it worked. The thread title has been changed, even on the "view all threads" part. How? I changed a couple threads I wrote and that doesn't work? Why should that be something only a moderator can do? That makes no sense.

 

This is a serious thread about moderator priviledges... or misconfigured forum software.. or polycounts

Regarding the topic, i'm really tempted to have her at about 150k since the scenes are stylised and intended to contain so few people, usually, and they won't generally leave a location. So have that, sucky graphics card owners. Or I might put her at 30k. God, so serious. How do professional game devs ever get things done, so many numbers to choose from

 

@Lazygunn: For my game, I have a setup with certain poly count restrictions for my game. Since it is a 2.5D fighter, I have a lot of liberties on what goes where.

Character Models: I went with between 60k-125k for the main fighter models, so I can have some room for creativity and flexible rigging and not be too bogged down by technical things (that will come later). I also went with 1x4096x4096 texture (Albedo/Normal/Alloy PackMap), 4-5 materials which are "Body" (Alloy Base Bumped Materials), Skin (Alloy SSS), Cornea (Alloy Distortion), Hair (Custom Shader until the Alloy one is complete). I plan on using LOD for the NPCS that range from just 15 people in an old town, to hundreds in a colloseum. About 7k should be fine (they are far from the camera in the background.

Levels: Variable depending on what needs to be made, such as tables, statues, and buildings far away. I could get away with the models being low res but very high res textures. Up to 2k for a single building. What I could do is make a 8k texture with EVERYTHING on one map, one material, but it would take a miracle to make it look good since Unity cuts you off at 4096.

 

Very interesting you mentioned the 2.5D fighter as my game is nothing like a 2.5D fighter but i realised the scenes are basically exactly in that form, with in particular a few major models that you would get near, any other character would be not accessible or not respond to you, and the scene be quite built up with hopefully nice detail or leave an interesting impression, like 2/2.5D fighters of yore, or another example is a scene in a point and click. The whole game wont be like that, just settlements as i don't have enough years in my life to beautify and make interactive an entire populated settlement. So you gave me a nice perspective (hah) on that, cheers! Do love some serious even in some silly. Alloy looks great by the way, how's it working out? I've got Skyshop but i'm just using it's tools really, shading with Lux, where I prefer the agility of the development, very easy to get things done with some back and forth, a noble cause to contribute to.

I'll be sticking with Lux for now, and probably quite a while, but i'm looking forward a great deal to games coming out using these systems

 

It is a very splendid shader set, and WICKED easy to set up. I was looking at Lux as well and I am tempted to see what I can do with it. I have screenshots for alloy shading but I will post them in my game project thread. If you have other tools like Substance Designer/Painter, Lux and Alloy are a match made in heaven. For my game, the hero character models WILL NOT have LODs since I do have shots where I do get in nice and close. Most likely, I won't even reach 125k, more like 95k-100k per characters. The hard part is making sure blendshapes and wrinkle maps work correctly.

The skin shaders for Lux/Alloy are very nice as well... I was looking at PBR based PostFX, but that is to be seen. I am very stringent in my design choices. I won't even use lights in my scenes unless necessary. All of my levels are baked with IBL completely (set the Diffuse on Skyshop to like .05)

 

My rule of thumb is to only use many as you need. No more than you need and no less. If to get the level of detail you want you actually need 150k then go for it. If it doesn't actually need to be that high poly because they would simply be wasted, then do 30k. Or do less.
For example, the character model for my game BHB is about 6600 polygons/12800 triangles. I could have gone higher if I really wanted but there was no need, in fact there were places where I was wasteful and could have made it lower. But despite being so low poly, it's detailed enough that I've been able to use it in photorealistic film images. So yeah, use what you need, no more, no less.

 

hey do you have any idea on how many tris a modern graphics card can handle?