My game is a tennis game. I am using a Makehuman mesh which I’m pretty happy with, but as the beginner I am in this, I totally overlooked the whole polycount thing.
Whenever I export through MHX2 into Blender, I get a 13.000 faced mesh. The racquet needs to be added too, which will end up making the whole character a 20.000ish faced mesh.
My question is, considering a tennis game only has one stage and two characters, can I get away with that amount of polys or should I reduce it to 1500-4000 anyway like Unity recommends?
I’m asking this because when I build the current phase of the game, it runs pretty smoothly on either my laptop or Android phone, and even though none of them is old, neither one is the latest on the market either.
It is probably fine. Actual poly counts aren’t the big deal as they once were, with shaders being more decisive in performance. Of course things are different on mobile, but the general sense is the same. I think Unity’s recommendations are old honestly, or making the assumption that you are going to be animating 100s of models at once.
20,000 isn’t TOO much, thought I would definitely question does it need that many polys. For a character, perhaps, but an additional 7,000 polys for a character is an awful lot.
Bear in mind that if you’re using quads 20,000 polys will become 40,000 triangles when imported into Unity.
On average, that poly count is not so high (reference here), but considering you’re currently working on a mobile game, I’d still try to reduce it to a more reasonable number (less than 10k triangles).
I’m going to take the opposite voice here. Why are you using so many polys, especially for mobile? It’s not that your number is inherently “too high”, but what gain is there when pared down to a mobile device screen? If you’re at a point where you can test to your mobile device, make two copies of the asset, one that is full poly count and one that is half. Load them both in a scene on the device and compare them. My guess is that in many cases, even during animation/motion, you aren’t likely to see a significant difference. If that’s the case, you are making your package smaller, keeping resource usage lower, and not losing any real quality. From a professional development standpoint, that’s a win.
If you compare them, however, and easily notice a serious difference in appearance, then keep it.
Just to be on the safe side, I finally decided to use the MH 1500 proxy, which maintains a decent detail level while keeping the mess really low-poly. By doing this, I guess I have more “poly credit” to use on other stuff on the screen.
