One of the possible uses of Unity I’m looking into is a movement called Machinima, movie making using realtime tools. Obviously it would be good if your hero characters had a full range of animation abilities including detailed facial animations, which would mean the face would need quite a lot of geometry, so the the stupid question is, how do I work out a polygon budget for any given scene? How do I know if the sample below has too many Polys in the head or whether I could add more? I guess there must be a way of working out a lowest common denominator eg a mac mini - and then trying to figure out how much the basic mini could handle? maybe that info is already out there?
Cheers
Boxy
Someone from the OTEE team, I believe it was Nicholas, did once post ideas about polygon count per scene etc but for the life of me I can’t find the thread using the forum Search function. Sorry.
OK thanks Davey, it would be worth coming up with some rough guidelines for both macs and PCs, I guess this might get complicated though, would the genre make a difference? etc.
Boxy Sav
though if your doing machinima you’ll only need to worry about your machine - no? how long it will take to render all the frames of a movie. the end file is just a .mov right? so you don’t need to worry as much about the limits of realtime rendering. more the strength of your machine and your patience level ;).
Thannks Pete. That is a useful link. As for the Machinima thing - you are right, perhaps I shouldn’t quite call it Machinima but I like the idea that as well as creating the movie in realtime you also allow the viewer to watch it in realtime be a ‘free roaming camera’ if they so choose. Once the Windows web player is released that will become a real possibility. Of course you could also create a quicktime movie - actually, how would you do that?
Boxy
Hmm, that is one heavy poly model you got yourself there, I see you model in quads just like me. In unity though It’s really an advantage to model in tri’s or else Unity will chop it up for you, creating a lot of poly’s!
Anyway you look at max poly count etc it’s allways smart to be economic on the poly count for later on (better having a faster game than a slower one).
so it’s like a non-interactive game where you can move around and watch the AI act out the story? yeah you’ll have to worry about optimizing if it’s realtime.
quicktime from unity… i don’t have a clue! my demo expired a while ago. haven’t had a chance to buy it cause my wife spends all my money!
I’m not sure I could work in Triangles, it really is a horrible experience I do have a much lower poly version of it though, guess I’ll just have to experiment and see what’s what.
You must find a way to buy it, I will gladly live on stale bread for the next few months if that is what it takes hehe
Thanks
Boxy
OverWhelmed Arena: Tried to keep the polygon count around 2000 per ship. There seems to still be lots of GPU power to spare on newer computers. Seem to be pushing the CPU more on the machines I’ve tested with.
Thanks Jon
hellfire looks like there’s a lot of leaning to be done in the optimizing dept!
I dug the wee fella out from a while ago, might try and use him in something, maybe even in a collaboration if anyone can think of a use for him…
Cheers
Boxy
Couldn’t you also do what the latest version of Studio Max does? That is, create a high-res/poly model, create an associated UV/bump/texture maps for the high-res model, then export the maps and apply it to a much lower res version of the same model, thus giving the appearance of a highly detailed model but using much fewer polygons? Or did I explain that correctly?
Well have you looked into declaring yourself a charity
I know how you feel, it is so frustrating, but this is why I applied for an Arts Council grant (UK), maybe there is something similar where you live? Basically, I was always too skint to invest in the kind of kit that I knew would help earn me more money, so I applied for a small business grant and quite unbelievably, got it. Now for the first (and possibly last) time ever I have exactly the kit I wanted (minus Unity but that is a temporary thing!)
Boxy
I am a clutz - I have Zbrush, I totally forgot about looking into the normal map possibility - never done any normal map stuff before so I guess it didn’t register!
There are way too many learning curves going on now, its starting to freak me out hehe…
Boxy
Thanks for the links, its funny whenever I go to the ZBrush forums with something in mind I always get side tracked by something else and end up forgetting why I went there! it is an astonishing bit of kit.
Shake that tin cup baby
Boxy
:?: not in the least - i’m laughing too. I really do get stuck looking at all the cool art for hours on end! or did you mean something else to someone else?
lol no, I suddenly thought it might be insensitive of me to make a joke of your financial woes!! I see my communication skills are coming along nicely - where’s my dummy…
