game modeling help

[cacophony]

uh i guess I'll just narrow it down to the question.

when a game developer is modeling, how many polys does he/she set aside for a specific thing? such as... maximum polys for a level, character, weapon, vehicle, scenery, special fx, ect

basically i just wanna know maximum poly count for those things :)

[bmyatt]

This all depends on what engine your using, and what hardware your targeting, usually engine documentation will have all the info included.

[cacophony]

ha oh.. well i feel kinda stupid now.. thanks though :)

[bmyatt]

hehe its cool man, i learned by asking questions also. If you want a basic idea you can look for the bf2 poly count guidline spreadsheet on fileplanet, or google it, but keep in mind that was for hardware 2 yrs. old, new hardware can handle way larger textures, and way larger poly counts. Like for example:

Bf2 Heavy Armor: 6-7K polys 1024x1024 texture map.
Frontlines Fuel of War (Release beginning of next year) Heavy Armor: 9-10k polys 2048x2048 texture map. It uses the unreal 3 engine ...

But like i said it all depends on what engine, and what hardware youll be targeting.

Hope this helps :)

[Steeeeee]

that depend on your target hardware and performance of the technology your using.

one example to give you an idea.

I developed a model to run happily on old hardware: Pentium4 with tnt2 level of hardware. lower than your likely gonna have to go.

This model has around a 100k of polys for the total scene. we then optimise this into sectors so only parts of the model are drawn at any one time. sectors are about 20k polys.

I dont know your target but you can probably go higher than this, but as a ball park its not a bad number to keep in mind, so that you consider the geometry you are adding to the scene and weather its worth the geometry budget you are spending on it!

hope that helps.

[aymenbnr]

yeah some engines depends on high poly modellling(extreamly expensive ones) some others depends on low poly modelling(genesis3d,ogre 3d,...)so it really depends on the engine you use.

[Steeeeee]

Dont know any engines that depend on high poly models?!! (aymenbnr, can you explain?) You use high poly models in games to bake out detailed normal maps etc, but the model you actually use is low poly.

[aymenbnr]

well,there is high poly engines but they are extreamly expensive.
torque is considered high poly modeling ,unreal engine,Quake engine,truevision3d,unity,3DVA....
these are all high poly engines and they are all expensive.(certain of these are very very expensive)