hundreds character on a game level, how much polycount per character? how about the maps?

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Hi all,

I’m doing a game major project now. And in my game I’d like to have hundreds of character in 1 scene. I’m wondering if each character have around 4000-5000 tris will it be laggy when played?

how about the uv maps, normal maps, is it affecting also? I’m planning to have something simmilar with Shogun2 fighting scene.

If you have Unity Pro use the profiler and Occlusion Culling,they are good for major project

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As edwar suggested you would certainly need Occlusion Culling. Specifically dynamic occlusion culling. What it does is avoid rendering (graphical processing) any objects which are not within predefined areas by you. http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Occlusion%20Culling.html You will also need to use LOD (Level of details. also a PRO only feature). What LOD does it render lower poly count models when they are further away from the camera (you will need to create the different versions by yourself). http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Level%20Of%20Detail.html

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Also, you might need to add more performance optimization. For instance, if you plan on using more then one material on your objects, I am not sure unity LOD's can reduce the materials used, so if not you could do that yourself (draw diffuse + bump when near camera, and only diffuse or change to vertex lit shader when further away from camera). This will reduce draw calls which is an important performance consideration feature.

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1 Answer

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This is a question that has no simple answer. There are simply too many variables that affect the outcome. For example, what platform are you referring to? If you mean a PC, then what kind of machine, and what GPU? What size screen are you going to render to? Things that affect the answer include:

a) If you are animating these 100 characters, then possibly the frame rate is going to be affected by the time it takes to animate all the bones of these characters.

b) If you have complex shaders on these characters, then possibly the game will be “GPU-bound” with the shaders taking a long time to calculate the colour of each pixel. (We see this a lot on mobile games.)

c) If you have a lot of materials in your characters, then the GPU may spend more time switching materials than drawing triangles.