hey guys i was just wondering…
in your various projects, im sure you’re working with somewhat strict poly-budgets to ensure that your finished product is both pretty to look at and smooth to run. so i suppose i’m just looking for answers to general questions like…
- how many polies do you have budgeted per scene
- how many for characters, items, enemies and the like (according to the context of what you’re working on)
- how much difference is there between publishing for webplayer / standalone PC player / mobile formats in terms of polycount and filesize?
i’m looking at stuff for a learning project (fps survival shooter) like 5k polies for my main character, 800-1200 polies per enemy, and 10-15k polies for my scenes overall. my most recent work has been with an RTS engine, where my budget was approximately 500 polies per unit (due to the possibility of massive spams of units)
the other question i suppose is about culling… how effective is the unity engine at culling unseen polygons on things like ingame objects, terrain editor meshes and the like? i realize this question is very general and probably hard to answer but at this point any input or opinion is welcome.
im a newcomer to unity, the closest experience i’ve had was with macromedia director, where it seemed like scenes of > 20k polygons would lag ridiculously in a webplayer… of course unity does a much better job of handling massive scenes, but i’d like to get a mental picture of exactly how much better :3
thanks in advance for your response, hopefully i can turn this information into something cool for you to look at and play with.
- Depends on scene complexity (an empty scene vs a level in Crysis). Anywhere from a couple of triangles, to millions of triangles. On a standalone with decent hardware, you can have millions of triangles at any given time.
- Depends on hardware power. Keep draw calls and triangles counts low and you can have as many characters, items, enemies and the like as you want (for the most part).
- Depends on the platform. Webplayer and standalone are similar because they can run on the same hardware (webplayer being slower), but mobile platforms are severely limited in poly counts with 10-100k being the norm.
10-15k for a whole scene? It will be practically empty, unless you you mean triangle count at any given moment. In which case, that’s a little small for a standalone app.
Culling in Unity is based on three systems. For Unity Free users, you have frustum culling (which clips the polygons further away than the edge of the camera’s view plane), and lod culling (which clips objects at specific distances from the camera). For Unity Pro users, you have Umbra occlusion culling (which culls objects automatically based on if the camera can see it or not).
Lol, Director. We have several guys here (one of which is now working at Unity) who migrated from Director to Unity. I wouldn’t even classify Director as a game engine.
Mental picture? How about a game instead?
Good luck with Unity. If you thought Director was good, you’ll be crying happily with Unity.
thanks for the quick and precise reply to my vague questions 
ah great. i wasn’t sure if the limitations were proportionate to hardware or if they obeyed some other intangible laws. the 10-15k was in reference to onscreen polygons. your comments about culling cleared a few things up for me too; i’ll have to do some engine tests of my own i suppose, but now i understand the methods it’s a bit easier.
and agreed, lol director. i worked on my own little project quite a few years ago to try and introduce LOD to a director scene, much in the same manner as it seems to work in the terrain editor and failed miserably to create anything workable 
from everything i’ve seen so far of unity, i’ve been very impressed and inspired… lots of flexibility and functionality, as well as a growing base of information both official and community that i can use in my own work.
for someone like me, a hobbyist who can do -ok- coding but with more of a passion for game artwork and design, it seems like a great fit.
bootcamp was what got me interested in the first place… beautiful and inspiring.
I usually do 10-20k polies for characters, 5k for characters who do not require much detail, 10k for first person weapons(not counting hands) and around 2k for 3rd person weapons.
For scenes I just use as little as possible depending on the object and detail required.