Yes, but how many polygons?

[Rick Stirling]

Yes, but how many polygons?

rsart - home of Rick Stirling, games artist, designer, egotist and raconteur » Blog Archive » Yes, but how many polygons?

Previously, I’ve explained that it is very difficult to answer the question “How many polygons should I be using in a character/vehicle/environment?” This doesn’t stop the question being asked however, so I thought I’d approach it in a different way - how many polygons have other games used?

By listing the game, the hardware it runs on, and any art information I could find, I hope that this will be a good starting point as to suitable polygon counts and texture sizes.

rsart - home of Rick Stirling, games artist, designer, egotist and raconteur » Blog Archive » Yes, but how many polygons?

[andrei313]

I was waiting for something like this. I hope you can find the time to make this a "full" list with everything that matters.

[Tiros]

Well, that sounds lik a good idea. And I'm sure many will fin it useful. I have one tip however, instead of counting the polygons, shouldn't you be counting tris? As one model may consist out of only 1 polygon but then contain 100 tris to create a shape out of it. This will probobly give a more correct answer. Unless you're counting the polygons of the already triangulated model, in that case every triangle would be seen as a polygon

[Rick Stirling]

Aye, polygons and triangles are not the same, but everyone should know that polycounts are always measured in triangles.

I'll add anything to the list that is from a good enough source - there are too many posts out there that guess "I think it's about 10,000 polygons". I'll also add texture sizes/counts where possible.

I should add the GoW stats, since those are in the D'Artiste book

[ArYeS]

I opened Source SDK -> Model Viewer, here are the polycount of few interesting things found in Half-Life 2:

Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons, 73 bones
Barney - 5922 polygons, 57 bones
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons, 44 bones
Combine Super Soldier (white one) - 5123 polygons, 44 bones
DOG - 5811 polygons, 58 bones
Eli - 6436 polygons, 57 bones
GMan - 7495 polygons, 70 bones
Dr. Breen - 6629 poylgons, 69 bones
Monk - 5623 polygons, 56 bones
Police - 3852 polygons, 57 bones
Vortigaunt - 2945 polygons, 43 bones

Combine Helicopter - 6415 polygons, 10 bones
Combine APC - 5202 polygons, 14 bones
Combine Dropship (without container, used at lighthouse part) - 8748 polygons, 79 bones
Airboat (without mounted gun) - 5944 polygons, 17 bones
Buggy (without mounted gun) - 5824 polygons, 31 bones
Gunship (insect like flying gunship) - 5712 polygons, 20 bones

Combine Strider - 6444 polygons, 17 bones
Combine Scanner (annoying flashlight flying machine) - 1495 polygons, 11 bones
Antlion - 1770 polygons, 35 bones
Antlion Guard (the big one, "boss") - 4964 polycount, 42 bones
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polyogns, 17 bones
Black Headcrab - 2732 polygons, 25 bones

First person weapons:
Gravity Gun - 1631 polygons, 14 bones (one arm visible)
SMG - 2854 polygons, 30 bones (two arms visible)
Shotgun - 1686 polygons, 27 bones (one arm visible)
Crowbar - 1493 polygons, 13 bones (one arm visible)
Pistol - 2268 polygons, 41 bones (two arms visible)
Crossbow - 3222 polygons, 33 bones (one arm visible)
NOTE: Not all arms and hands are same, some are less cropped some more.

I hope it'll be useful to everybody.

[Talon]

Another note for HL2; the LOD meshes are approximately 60% of the polycount of the LOD above them.

So, while Alyx is ~8k and the high-res GMan is ~10k, they have several (I think Alyx has 7) LOD models to them that cuts the polycount down severely the further they are away from the camera. A lot of the other meshes in HL2 have 3 or 4 levels of detail to them.

[ArYeS]

All my weapon lods were 0, and character 1.

Maybe they rised polycount of gman in Episode One.. my data is from vanilla Half-Life 2.

[Stormy]

Yea, they did beef up the poly counts of a lot of the models in episode 1. It did come out a good wile later so it was just your average joe graphical update.

[Rick Stirling]

Cheers ArYeS, I've cherry picked a few from that list.

[Stormy]

I found this a wile back and it may well come in handy.

Typical Content Specifications

Here are the guidelines we're using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game.

Characters

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.

Normal Maps & Texture maps

We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity. Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles. Lights

There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.

Polygons counts for some of the Half-Life 2 characters:



* Soldiers: 4682
* Police: 3852
* Resistance: 4976
* Zombie: 4290
* Helicopter: 6415
* Strider: 6444
* Alyx: 8323

There are no fixed rules in determining how many polygons you use in your model, or how much texture resolution you'll use in your materials. There are upper limits of engine capability, (10,000 polygons/model, 17,433 vertices and 2048 texture size) but these aren't usually going to be what you're shooting for. You'll need to consider how many of the character, vehicle, or prop you're making will be on screen. If you'd like dozens of them on screen at any given time, you'll have a different budget than if you'd only like to see one of them ever on screen at a time. With humanoid characters, especially for multiplayer use, you shouldn't need to go over 4000 polygons to get a character that has enough detail to accurately describe the form, bend properly at the joints, and have enough edges to light properly. Of course you can have more than that, but with normal mapping, and high res textures, you shouldn't really need to.

WOW characters should not exceed 2000 polys. The hand-painted textures are also the key to getting the most out of your limited poly count.
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http://www.blizzard.com/inblizz/con..._warcraft.shtml

@ 5000 tris the qualty of the silhouettes would take a typical submission out of the WOW universe. Consistency of style could only be managed by dumbing down a model. ( the horror... )

Here are two thoughts on a werk around fer the problem:

* The Expansion Pack is released for a future broadband technology that allows 4000/6000 poly candy happiness. Our submissions reflect an upgrade that lies between the current blocky/cartooney look upward to the grand "thick" Hyper-fantasy-realism present in dem fantastic WOW cinematics. Consistency is then dependant on general Blizzard Concept Art, Blizzard's "glowy" color pallete, present polycount cartoonyness, the Blizzard texture style and grand Cinematic precedence.

* "Boss Characters" with such High Intricate detail that 4000/6000 tris are required to maintain the current WOW style/look.