Hi I was wondering what the polygon limit is for this engine! lets say I have a 5000 poly character… would it still work?
65000 vertices per mesh is the limit right now.
Cheers,
-Jon
is that the total amount allowed in the entire engine including the character environment and everything else?
No. No, not at all. Have a play round with the demo, and see when it starts to choke. Youve got a lot of elbow room. Optimum size per object is somewhere between 4000 and about 6000 polies, but thats a bit of a grey area.
HTH
AC
thanks A LOT!
aaaarrrrggghhh! My Tiger I model is 11000 right now. That’s by Maya count and it is almost finished.
Just some minor tweaking left. Can’t wait to take it for a test drive.
Looks awesome! I imagine youd have the turret and tracks as seperate objects, right? so that would ease the pressure on the polycount front…
And quads get converted to triangles too remember…(Double your count)
There will be efficient methods for getting the best out of your model. I think the exract tool will copy faces into a new object, so you can split large objects that way…
Keep us posted!
11.000 polys is no problem. Unity is really a poly-pusher so you are completely in the limits. Be sure to build an LoD Script, so you can reduce the polycount by switching to lower res models, when it comes to far distance views (wich will happen in a tank battle for sure 
). For optimum performance use around 1500 polys for long distance models and around 3000 - 5000 for medium distance models.
We are currently building a little space-shooter and our battleships have about 20.000 Polys in max. LoD Level. Runs very fluid, even on older machines.
Very nice model by the way! Looks very authentic.
How relevant is the LOD strategy in real practice I wonder. If you’re in the sweet spot, you’re in the sweetspot. Any less is pointless, and any more is creating bottle necks. is the idea to have lo res meshes at 1500, and high res meshes at say 6000?
has anyone done any benchmarking in this area? Im not convinced LOD is that relevant from all the information I’ve seen in two years of reading this forum. That is, in context to getting games running smooth on old and new hardware.
Has anyone seen any clear improvement in performance thru LOD Mesh swapping?
I really noticed the framerate dip when using a single 50,000 poly mesh on my abacus…
AC
Polygons matter in one case: if you’re running on a card that does not have hardware vertex processor (think Intel GMA 950 and friends). On all Real Cards, you have to try really hard to push it to the polygon limit.
There is another aspect. When having fine detailed objects on video-cards with no anti-aliasing, you get very ugly blinking pixels on the objects details when looking from greater distances. So its better to just deactivate them or use less detailed versions.
Each track and wheel,fender, skirt,the turret, barrel components etc are seperate meshes/objects for the damage model.
I am really working hard to get this running to see if Unity does/can be made to do what we need for our sim idea before the trial period ends.
good stuff man. Mine is about 3800 polys but I’m missing legs and arms (i have the hands), the head isnt done, and the model has extra polys I can remove. so I can expect maybe another 1000. I’m gonna clean it up afterwards also.