Character poly count

I know this has been asked over and over again and there is no real answer but I thought I’d ask it again anyways.

I’m working on my character and I want to know how many polys I can push. I heard that the number should fall somewhere between 200-500 tris? Is this correct?

Does anyone know the poly count for penelope?

Correct. The reason this question is unanswerable is because it depends on a large number of things.

The main determining factor is how much other stuff you plan on having in your scene. I am working on a project that is basically one character on the screen with UI and pre-rendered backdrop and I’m shooting for about 3,000 tris. Put a character with that kind of poly count into penelope and watch the game chug along at 3 fps.

Thanks Mattimus for the reply. Forgive my noobish questions but what is a pre-rendered background? Do you mean baking the texture into the mesh? Also, did you mean that if you put a character with 3000 tris into Penelope that would slow it down to 3fps? I’d surely agree with you there :slight_smile:

Pre-rendered background means I modeled, textured, and lit a scene inside a 3D package, rendered out a still image, and put that image on a plane inside Unity. With a still camera, it affords good quality 3D without the cost.

And yes, if Penelope was 3,000 polys the game would come to a crawl. That is, if the game ran at all.

Hey Mattimus, I’ve read that another thing to look out for is the use of a skybox. Something to do with draw calls? I threw together a skybox with an image I found off the internet as an example. Do they really drag down the fps?

The default skybox is bad because it uses 6 different materials/textures - thus 6 draw calls.

It looks like you’ve made your own sky-cube and UV mapped it - so one texture, one material, one object, one draw call.

The 1.5 Update now includes an iPhone specific skybox that should only take 1 draw, I think.

I tried working with it but it didn’t have the results I expected. Has anyone else gotten the skybox to work?

What problems do you have exactly with new skyboxes? If it is serious, please, submit a bugreport.

Hey 0turner0, Thanks for the reply. Now I get it! I had no idea ppl where talking about the default skybox in Unity. So that skybox I made shouldn’t drag down the fps much at all then?

Where is this “new skybox”?? I open my project in Unity 1.5 and go to the renderfX/skybox and it is still the old skybox with 6 textures.

Thanks