Hi Everyone,
We were going to start work on some 3D Models for our IOS based game.
We wanted to enquire if we would be able to render High Poly characters/Models on an IPhone/IPad without losing performance or should we stick to low poly ones.
Could you also give me some example of games that uses High Poly and of those that use Low Poly.
For example: Infinite Blade → Does it use High Poly or Low Poly models?
Thanks for the help,
Mike
The fabled, high and low poly… numbers, give numbers. For some high poly is over 1 million tris, other it is over 10k tris, for some low poly is under 15k tris others 1k tris. We would also need to know the type of game and if you want to support only the latest devices.
I strongly advise to work with optimized meshes/models for iOS. Depending on everything else that is going on you may see performance going down if you have various high poly skinned/rigged characters on screen at the same time. As for Infinity Blade, they are not really using high poly characters, it’s all baked down to normal maps in combination with good diffuse/specular and lighting.
Thank you for the quick answer. This is just what I wanted to know.
I also think targeting devices such as IPhone 4 would make it difficult to add High Poly characters on the screen since they will take a lot of rendering time+they will cause issues in performance of the Game App.
Thanks for the answer.
I am not allowed to give out any details yet, however, I will mention that consider it as a combat game which includes multiple 3D characters.
So my main reason for asking this question was: Will the device like IPhone 4 be able to support – lets say 8-10 High Poly 3D Characters with a Cubic Terrain under them?
Thanks for the answer.
I am not allowed to give out any details yet, however, I will mention that consider it as a combat game which includes multiple 3D characters.
So my main reason for asking this question was: Will the device like IPhone 4 be able to support – lets say 8-10 High Poly 3D Characters with a Cubic Terrain under them?
But I guess that is answered now. We have decided to go with Low Poly models with proper bump diffuse and lighting (Well the designers work i guess 
)
Just remember the Iphone 4 is incredibly weak. IIRC Infinity blade 2 is not fun at all on it, unplayable. and that is really optimised with lots of magic going on.
For iPad mini, my tests concluded she’ll start to buckle around a total of 12,000 animated polygons(or was it triangles?) this includes all your characters combined. Sometimes you can get away with more if the characters are lower poly.
However, there are always ways to break the limits…
That is far, far lower than the Ipad mini should be capable of.
EDIT: Oh, just saw that was animated.
Really? I couldn’t get anymore animated polygons out… At least not without cheating. Is there a spec list somewhere?
Environment wise I know she can handle 100’s of thousands of triangles.
Yeah, sorry I didn’t see that it was animated.
Check out the draw call subject here :
You can break limits with some good optimization tricks 
Also remember that your test doesn’t include any gameplay, physic, sound, etc…
Then take it easy with hi poly…
Yeah, the test was basic and disapointing. I ended up terrorizing the unity engine to give me higher poly characters but there’s that lingering fear of things coming undone. By the way, nice low poly modelling in chronology - people underestimate the skill involved in that.
This pretty much tells you exactly what to look for:
Low poly generally refers to the model that actually gets used in-game, while high poly means multi-million polygon model (from which the low poly model usually gets its information from). The reason for this definition is because low-poly can vary greatly from system to system, there’s no exact number. It could be a single sprite or a 200,000** poly in-game model (such as in Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3). In Virtua Fighter 5, the individual animated characters are around 40,000. **
But they’re still considered to be low-poly models because they’re not multi-million poly models.
The general process is that you make your high poly model containing all the information you want the character or object to have. Basically, you make it exactly the way you want it to look, nothing held back. With characters especially, this is usually done in a tool like Zbrush or Mudbox. Then you make a low poly model, with a polygon count low enough to meet the requirements of whatever your target platform is. So whether your target poly count is 1000 or 10,000, it doesn’t really matter so long as you can use normal maps.
Through a process called baking, you transfer the detail from the multi-million poly model onto the low-poly model, in the form of textures. The surface detail gets captured in the normal map, while the color and ambient occlusion gets captured in the diffuse map.
The end result is a low poly model that looks remarkably similar to the high poly model, despite the vast difference in polygon counts.
In the case of Epic and Infinity Blade, that’s pretty much what they did. The characters and stuff are still low poly, probably about as low poly as any other game. They just look really detailed because they’re using textures extracted from high poly models.
In a production environment, this workflow is very efficient since you can have one team pumping out high-resolution sculpts very quickly, and have another team do all the baking and optimizing, and it’s kept completely separate. Plus you can re-use the original sculpt as needed, meaning if the low poly model isn’t low enough or the topology isn’t good enough, or you need to fix the UV mapping, you can make adjustments as needed and simply transfer the detail again.
**Source:
http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/23520-Historical-Poly-Counts