Average polygon count in the scene to achieve decent fps?

Unity Engine
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1

I plan to use Unity3D and I have question about average polygon count in the scene. As I’m programmer and I’m not familiar with 3d modeling tools like 3dmax/maya I need some numbers to specify polygon budget for designer.
The game will consist of four or five characters with skeletal animation, a room or some small place for characters, target platform is iPhone4/iPad. Something like this.
Thanks in advance.

2

Thats by no means related to polygons or vertexes. It depends more on what you do with that. You can easily make iPad 1 dog slow by using just one fullscreen plane and assign an overly complex shader to it.

But to give you a hint, just for a test i made once a car model with 40.000 verts. I used basic shaders only. No transparency, no OpenGL ES 2.0 stuff. Still got 60 FPS.

If i enable GL 2.0 and use normal maps and transparency the Framerate drops to maybe 20 FPS.

I can recommend the book “Creating 3D game art for the iphone with unity”, which explains in detail how to make models and textures, what to avoid and why.
Although its only one year old it unfortunatly does not cover any GL 2.0 related things. But besides that, its very well woth the money.
Search the web for 3D Ninja, he wrote the book.

3

Thanks you, but in general - can I get a raw numbers for simple game (i.e. with basic shaders only)?
I’m interesting in average polygon count in frame and textures count (or textures size in bytes). I’ll appreciate if someone shares his own experience.

4

Read the documentation please, it is all covered there under best practises for mobile. But as a guideline:

  1. you will be able to push around 10,000 polygons at a decent 30fps framerate under average conditions

  2. you will be able to push considerably less than that, and we cannot give you an estimate, if they are boned models. The reason we cannot give you an estimate because it depends on the interplay between: number of bones, number of verts influenced by how many bones (configurable), and number of verts which may or may not include normals, lighting, colour and so on.

  3. test it. Honestly, just make a bunch of tests, these questions you’re asking - aren’t answerable by us.

  4. shaders and fill rate will usually kill you long before models do. Its not how big it is, its what you do with it!

For example you could have a 40,000 poly model run at 60fps with antialiasing on if you wanted but in another game it would run at 5fps. It depends so much on what you are doing with them.

So do some tests and put your mind at rest. Ensure you are applying mobile shaders of your choice during your tests.

5

If you have transparent areas, try to do it in model rather than using transparent shader. Transparency planes are easiest way to kill performance. Alpha channel is so easy way to make shadows and lights to look awesome, but it’s expensive way from performance view to mobile devices. Just noticed in one project that if you have couple of transparency shader planes on top of each other, it drops performance to few FPS…