How many triangles are adequate for a first person weapon these days?

[rascal]

Hi mates,

i plan to do an AK47 as my next portfolio piece and it is supposed to be a first person AK with a scope and a bayonet for CS:S. Valve used 979 triangles for their Counterstrike: Source AK back then. I have already 2000 now and i am not halfway through, so that i calculate with ~5-6000 once i am finished.

I remember reading somewhere here (was not able to find it) that UT3 uses to the point of 10.000 triangles for their biggest first person guns so would you guys think that this is legitimate to do these days? And talking about UT3 does anybody know the count of the crysis guns perhaps? I am definitely not aiming to make it as lowpoly as possible because i want to show off some mad modeling on it.

Something else i noticed at the CS:S AK47 was that everything is in triangles. That makes me wonder because from what i have learned not so long ago, you should always prefer quads over triangles.

Valve AK: (i wrote on that pic before i realized that everything was in triangles on it)


Thanks in advance!

[geodav]

all i can say is for UT3, 1st person weapons can be up to 12k (triangles) but if you want it to be a dual weapon like the enforcers then 5k. As for polys vs triangles, game engines render triangles so thats what you need to count eg 1 quad = 2 triangles, working with quads is nicer but always remember the triangle count.
Sorry i don't have crysis so i can't help you there

[SnowFella]

Well, I've made a current gen first person model of an AK47 using just a fraction over 2000 polys, 2053 exactly...2375 for the folding stock version. Sure that's without scope or bipod but still it's a fully modeled AK47 with mag, bolt and safety made to be animated.

It's all about using your polys in an efficient way and backing them up with a good normal map, you'd be suprised how much you can get away with if you just get the colour, spec and normal maps right.

[Talon]

How long is a piece of string?

Just look at the guns of the engine you're modding, find one that's of similar size to the one you're making and you should be able to get an accurate estimate.

[Insulaner]

Crysis guns a varying from 800 to 4000 polies roughly. You just have to ask yourself if it's worth to put 4000 polies into a gun. If you have a scope, than you might want to put a lot of polies into that, because of how close it is to the screen.

Somebody once said, that "next-gen" is if something that is round.. is round.

[DaveW]

The guns in Crysis are very small/thin though.

If there's guns already in the engine, use those as an estimate. Unless it's quite old (i.e. CSS) in which case, just go higher. It depends on what kind of gun it is, what amount of detail that needs to be modelled. Also, whenever something goes ingame it's converted to triangles (how you model is a different matter, becaues you can use N-Gons). I'd say for an AK47, if you intend to model the detail rather than normal map it (best way to do it really) - aim for about 7000.

[rascal]

thanks. yes, i know that you can do a hell of a job with normals etc. the orginal cs:s AK is already very effiecent modeld in terms of being lowpoly but still looking great but i since it has been already a few years since the release i thought i can blast some more polys into it or otherwise there wouldn't have been a real sense behind making it new. An example would be this part here where of course i could have made things easier.. but regarding that this is also meant to be a portfoliopiece i thought i put in some details, so that when i sent applications the folks see that i really was looking at references and how it is made.



Anyways, thanks for the infos! I will see what i can do to save some polys once i start optimizing.

[HellSpike]

Well for one you could get rid of all the useless chamferings, seams and details you'll never see from a first-person perspective.

A model with all the details where they should be, while looking good in first-person perspective is more impressive than a model with all the details modeled on, but which are barely visible in-game.

[rascal]

yes. it's true hellspike.. i have too much stuff in there. i already got rid of quite a lot

[Jimi]

I've been doing some 1000-2000 weapons, but I also plan to use them in 3rd person view or on other characters...