[Yozora]

Thanks for the quick responses!

It might be worthwhile asking other things like number of characters on screen at once, engine used, character's average distance to camera, number of LOD levels and their percentage of LOD above, etc... these are also important considerations when deciding on polycounts and texture resources for characters.

Hmm I figured I could do some research on the engine used when people listed the game title so didnt include that. I can see how the distance and camera angle can affect the character model but in terms of workflow, how does the number of LODs change anything? Does the game artist need to make multiple LOD versions of their model or is this something the game engine can automatically do?

I'm mainly focusing on the workflow of the actual character modeling process, I believe the limitations we have to work with are absolute and that the limitations do define alot of the model, but the causes of these limitations are irrelevant to the model itself. Am I wrong?

Originally Posted by Rick Stirling

I think you should read my other article, How many polygons in a piece of string

It was a good read but I find it hard to believe that game developers do not state the limit for their characters... either that or they assume the game artists know the limits already and make the character based upon the genre/engine. Which would bring me to the next question, how do game artists inherently know this kind of information, where is their source?
I'm not sure how it works between the artist and the developer, how do they tell you what they want? Since they dont give you technical specifications, then they must be doing it visually by existing screenshots of the game, or by comparing their game with another similar game for reference?


In one of the responses to your article, A short answer is “as few as possible without sacrificing the minimum quality bar that’s expected for the game” - How does someone know what the minimum quality bar is? Isnt this defined by the game developers at some point?

I'm not looking for a ultimate answer that solves this question in a single line, I know that's not possible... but what I am trying to do is gather information on models that have been made, for games that have been made. These facts do not change and they may not be the perfect answer, but it definitely is useful in some way. It's pretty much what you stated in your article:

"So how do you figure it out? For one, you play games and have a look. Look at what details are modelled, and which ones are textured. Have a look at screenshots to see if you can spot repeating textures (remembering that most screenshots are ‘tweaked’). Have a look at game art forums where people not only display their work but usually an overview of it."

But instead of looking and guessing the numbers myself I thought that getting the numbers off the actual artist's themselves would be far more accurate This is exactly what you did in your 2nd article on this subject anyway, listing poly counts for existing models - this questionnaire can help build your list further and include texture map sizes/quantities as well (assuming it gets any responses).



This is the kind of information that I find useful, found on the Unreal Technology website:

For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

* Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
* Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
* Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

From this I can see that my character isn't gonna be very low poly like for a hand held games system and although 3,000 to 12,000 is a pretty big range, it gives a good overview. At least I know I can't make it over 50,000 for the in game character, right? It also states the number of normal maps they expect to use and the size, although it doesnt say anything about the other texture limits. Still its better than nothing at all!