Hello,
The company I work for is about to start developing our game using Unity and right now I have a question on what the max poly count is that Unity can handle for characters and the world?
I’ve seen some really great stuff on here and it seems like a lot of the characters are between 1200 to 1500 tris. Thanks for reading my post and I look forward to showing everyone some in game sneak peaks in the coming months.
-Jeff Baker
Lead 3D Artist
ISO Interactive
It depends on many things. I guess the first thing is whether it’s a web game or a desktop one.
If you’re talking of a desktop game, I’d tend to say that you could easily push polygons to 3k-4k even 5k.
But again it depends on the type of game (ie. FPS vs RTS), how well is the game developed (and optimized), that kind of things.
I’d be interested to hear other’s people thoughts about that to.
This page talks a little bit about that:
http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Modeling%20Optimized%20Characters.html
Obviously it’s going to depend a lot on what you want as minimum system requirements for your game. And how many characters are going to be in any one scene.
Browser and desktop versions are essentially the same speed; they run off the same engine. Browsers typically limit fps in windowed mode but that’s not going to affect the number of polygons you can push. It’s really not about Unity, but rather the hardware. If you have a low-end integrated graphics system like the Intel GMA chips, then you want to keep polygon count down. If you’re targeting high-end machines with something like 4870s or 8800s, then you can do 10K polygons per character if you want, probably 1M for the world or thereabouts.
The only Unity limit is about 65K vertices per single mesh; there is no limit for the scene. Other than that it totally depends on the hardware you’re targeting.
–Eric
It’s a tricky question to ask without any context. How long is a piece of string?
We push 500k triangles in a scene without any issues; your character counts are going to depend on the number of characters. Are you making a virtual world with dozens of on-screen characters? Or a fighting game with two?
Unity doesn’t have any unusual limitations compared to other modern engines. The polygon count question is going to boil down to your target hardware.
These are some great responses.
Lets assume the target is browser based with about 50 ‘toons’ on the screen at a time. Minimum Requirements of:
2ghz Processor
1gb memory
128 video card
For something like an RTS. One of our major concerns is the load time.
Jeff Baker
Lead 3D Artist
ISO Interactive
Video card performance is not measured by the amount of video memory it has.
A 256MB Intel GMA X3100 is still 20 times slower than a 128MB GeForce 8600…