Hello everyone,
I’m newly registered to this forum but me and my team are unofficially having a play with the trial version to see if we can get to grips and port some of our work over from a modding scene we did for crysis.
I was wondering if anyone on these forums would be able to tell me an ideal polygon/triangle count for a hero character (main character) that the engine would be able to render and perform without loss of performance. Obviously other factors are involved in general FPS but in general terms.
For instance, we are used to making roughly 10-12k character meshes for “next gen engines”, with the mindset of making it as low as possible for performance reasons. Is unity any different?
Thanks
Nick
Nope, not really. That sort of poly-count is fine for a main character, just remember that animation/bones, materials, and the quality of the scripts driving your game are just as important to performance (if not more so) than polygon counts these days. It all depends entirely on the type of game, complexity of the scene, physics, blah blah. Things that nobody but yourself can really judge until you try it.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/65320-what-are-good-performance-polygon-counts-for-characters-props-machines
Hi xomg,
Thanks for your reply. We plan to keep things “fairly” simple and look at developing a platformer game that has some 3d elements. The only difference is our characters are quite large animals, dinosaurs in fact. We have experience in animating these and modeling/texturing but i have been speaking to our artists and ideally we would like to try and max out our large main dinosaur at 5k.
(example - http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/10/9191/LWR_Lowpolyrex.jpg )
We are hoping to find some willing programmers who would be interested in working with a dinosaur based game later down the road when we make a official announcement.
Thanks for your help.
Nick
Oh man… there aren’t many things more awesome than dinosaurs, so I wish you luck with this. That’s a very nice model you’ve posted there.
I’m confident that you could stretch to 10k for your main character without worrying, but that would be more appropriate for some kind of third-person shooter than a platformer. It won’t perform much differently than a 5k character, and if you’re going to splash out on polygons anywhere it might as well be your main character. I’ve never really worked with dinosaur models, though, so your artists probably know what they’re doing. You can provide almost all the detail with normal maps on a dinosaur’s skin, but for the face/feet/hands/mouth I’d say to just go ape and push past 5k total if you need it.
Is the number of bones very important to performance ? I’ve been going pretty crazy with bones in a facial rig lately.
Bones are always going to have an impact on performance, so yes. Keep it as simple as possible, especially if the camera isn’t going to be all up in your characters face. How much impact it’ll have depends entirely on your game and what you’re doing, so you’ll have to benchmark it yourself.
