Questionnaire for people working in the games industry

[Yozora]

Hi I'm a university student studying games design and for one of my projects I have chosen to research the character creation process used by game artists.
This short questionnaire is about the limitations of the games you have worked on or are currently working on right now.

I know the usual "how many polys" questions are usually responded by a "it depends..." and I've found a very long thread on beyond3d forums that discuss the number of polys that many models use in a list of games, but I also need to know the texture size and limits that are typically used too which isnt in their list (which can be found here "Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers - Beyond3D Forum).

If you have the spare time could you copy this questionnaire and send the answers to ukchichiri@hotmail.com, it would be greatly appreciated!
Or if you prefer you could just post a reply to this thread. I'm sorry if someone has already done a similar questionnaire but if there is then can you please be kind enough to show me a link to it.

(for the number of textures you could say something like 2* 256x256 diffuse, 1*256x256 alpha for example)
(the "other limitations" bit could be something like in Quake III, where character models are divided into 3 sections - head, torso, legs)

If you have done work for multiple companies/games or made multiple characters then can you just copy/paste another questionnaire and fill it up please

______________________________________________

Occupation/Company:
Game Title/Year:
Game character:
Polygon Limit:
Number of textures and types:
Other limitations:

Any other comments/advice is welcome
______________________________________________

[Talon]

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.

[Rick Stirling]

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

[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!

[benclark]

Originally Posted by Yozora

It was a good read but I find it hard to believe that game developers do not state the limit for their characters...

I think you can trust what Rick Stirling says, I hear he has worked on a few games before

I get the feeling from your last post that youare trying to find info for individual game engines. That info you have pasted in for Unreal Tournament is specifically for the game UT3, not for the unreal engine.

Most poly limits for games quoted online are as the result of people pulling game meshes into the game editors or model viewers and checking them out. So this info you are collecting is specific to individual games, not their engines

As an example take Unreal Engine. The characters in Gears of War are high detail, with high res textures. Now look at Roboblitz, which is running in the same engine, the characters are pretty basic and the attention is on materials to give the feel of the game

So the developers of both these games were working with the same engine but to totally different constraints

How many examples do you need for your project? I think your best bet is to stick to games that have editors, buy them and get the numbers for yourself

[Talon]

I also have to mention that if you're researching the character creation process, polycount isn't really a major factor in the process itself. It's just an arbitrary limitation placed on the model's specs.

The character creation process would be more about creating a character that fits within those limitations and how the workflow changes depending on those limitations, altered by the complexity of the character desired inside of those specs, the shaders required for the character, whether that character must conform to a generic rig to share animations, how articulate the face or hands need to be, what engine it's running on, etc...

All of these change from game to game and from character to character within a game. Hell, the process for this stuff changes from artist to artist. There's no real definitive answer to this sort of thing other than "It depends...".