"Low Poly"

[MeatShield72]

Now I hear "Low Poly" alot when it comes to game asset creation.

But how many polys in say one environment is actually low poly?

Same with a character and their weapons?

[Tiros]

I'm gonna have to go ahead and quote our very own Ben Clarke for this;

how long is a ropey piece of poo?

Depends on the game, platform etc. etc. We can't give you a number. But aslong as the game doesn't lag as hell, then it's a good start

[velenosangue]

It's all relative.

To some extent, low poly refers generally to all 3d models intended for realtime use, because any game art is low poly compared to the detail that can be used in film and prerendered cut-scenes.

When you have multiple LODs for the same model, you can refer to the less detailed ones as low poly and the more detailed ones as high poly.

/* LOD = Level of Detail = Versions of the same model with lower and higher detail that can be swapped out for each other as the object gets closer or further away from the camera. This frees up unneeded system resources allowing for a higher level of closeup detail at any given time. */

How many polygons an individual object gets is determined by finding out how much total detail the target machine can handle at a given moment, then budgeting it out to characters, props and environments. How this is done depends on a number of factors, such as what type of game, max characters on screen at one time, etc.

[MeatShield72]

You know, I some how knew that was the answer. I just wanted to double check just incase by some weird chance that there might be a real number.

Originally Posted by velenosangue

How many polygons an individual object gets is determined by finding out how much total detail the target machine can handle at a given moment, then budgeting it out to characters, props and environments. How this is done depends on a number of factors, such as what type of game, max characters on screen at one time, etc.

Do you know good articles or blogs or anything about this topic?

[Cryrid]

That's what we tell all the new-comers. The real answer is 5 or less.

Originally Posted by MeatShield72

You know, I some how knew that was the answer. I just wanted to double check just incase by some weird chance that there might be a real number.

Do you know good articles or blogs or anything about this topic?

I think a good place to start with would be whatever engine/sdk you are using. They often come with preformance-monitoring tools so you can see where the budget is being spent drawing the scene. You can just use simple judgement to make cuts from there

[MeatShield72]

Originally Posted by Cryrid

That's what we tell all the new-comers. The real answer is 5 or less.

Dam, I have been going about things the wrong way!

HAHA.

[urgaffel]

Can't really give you any hard triangle counts but for textures, a 512 texture usually equals two meters (1024 = 4m etc etc). That pixel density usually works quite well for buildings/environments/props. Some props will need to have larger textures and characters are almost always higher res (damn resource hogs...)

[velenosangue]

Originally Posted by urgaffel

Can't really give you any hard triangle counts but for textures, a 512 texture usually equals two meters (1024 = 4m etc etc). That pixel density usually works quite well for buildings/environments/props. Some props will need to have larger textures and characters are almost always higher res (damn resource hogs...)

Speaking of which, I've been wondering what texel density people here prefer to use. In the sets I do for work I usually go for 512 pixels to a meter for objects the user can get close to.

I also recently made an image showing what different densities actually look like on a real world object (an american quarter):

[Ghostscape]

Rick Stirling has some info from recent games here:

rsart – Rick Stirling, games artist » Blog Archive » Yes, but how many polygons?

[Benjyshwa]

The Rick sterling link is really helpful! also someone has posted it on some other forums with some more info regarding characters poly counts, that you can find here. "Drake - ~30,000 polygons" Never knew you could have so many polys!