The title says it all. I was recruited as a game artist for a project ware the creator has decided for us to use Unity for the engine. Now we have plenty of concept art and it’s time to start making the 3D assets. But the basic question came up… How many polys can I make my model? We got levels, characters, assets, and monsters to make but can’t really get started without a budget.
So vets of the engine what are you allowed to use and when dose the game just not want to work? I was thinking for starters I say that the characters models can be 12k tries and the levels up to 20k tries. What do you guys think and what is the limit? I can’t really help out my other artist and set budgets if we don’t know the thresh hold.
Thank you for your help in advance and I look forward to making some game assets
There is no limit. And with PC it depends on whatever arbitrary Min Spec you choose. Do you need a top of the line computer bought in the last year? Or maybe the min spec if a 5 year old net book.
The limitations are soft limits, do you want to target 60 FPS, 30 FPS, 15 FPS(this one is 4x more lenient than 60FPS), are you using transparencies, do you need vertex colors, or do position, normal suffice for your verts (that’s an extra 50+% more data to pass to the GPU per vert). What kind of PostFX do you need? What kind of shaders do you plan on using? How many lights will be visible at any arbitrary point? directional or point? pixel of vertex lights? How many Draw Calls are you going to have?
Anyone who gives you a value is going to be giving you a value that is incredibly specific to their specific testing rig, with their specific models, and their specific shaders, and their specific scene structure, etc… and the only way you can get a good usable value is to setup some prototypes of what you hope to accomplish and push it on the lowest end devices that you expect it to run.
12 000 tris for a character and 20 000 for the level ?
that’s a lot of triangles for a single character, and very few for a level. But ofcourse it depends on the importance and amount of characters, and the size of your level.
Generally I try to keep it as lowpoly as possible without reducing quality too much.
For the project I’m currently working on, my characters (npcs) are usually a max of 1000 tris, but the level is probably a couple of million tris. But then again, it contains really large scenes (multiple kms) with a lot of random people in it, and it only runs good on newer pcs.
But Ntero is right, it all depends on the project and the the target hardware.
What kind of game is it ? (Not asking for details)
im not sure anymore, but around unity 2.6 the poly limit was around 65,000 polys per model, but there was no limit as to how many those models to draw, that depends more on the hardware you are using to run, but a single model of that many polys for a game is obscene, so i dont think its a problem
That limit per individually rendered mesh was and is 65,535 for a specific reason (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cbf1574z(v=vs.71).aspx). That limit however is for indices, not polys, and so the actual limit measured in triangles per mesh part should be around 1/3 that.
So this is what I got so fare for the project was wondering what you guys think:
Static Models that are props: 1k polys pending on what it is
Dynamic models: 10k for important models 5k for non important
Levels: 50k
Town Modules: 10k
I am going to have all the artist save there textures out as “.psd” sense you can optimize the textures later pending on the platform and hardware your going for.
This is the hardware the game designer wants to aim for:
Crysis 2 Minimum System Requirements
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 x2 2Ghz or better
GPU: NVidia 8800GT 512Mb, ATI 3850 512Mb or better
RAM: 2GB
DX: 9
Shader: 3.0
OS: Windows XP
Frame Rate Target: 20fps@1024x768
Crysis 2 Recommended System Requirements
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 x2 2.66Ghz or better
GPU: NVidia GTX280 1GB, ATI 4870 1GB or better
RAM: 3GB
DX: 9
Shader: 3.0
OS: Windows XP
Frame Rate Target: 30fps@1650x1080
The Witcher 2 Miminum System Requirements:
• OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista SP2 / Windows 7 (32/64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+
• Memory: 1 GB Windows XP / 2 GB Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Video Card: 512 MB RAM, supporting Pixel Shader 3.0 (Nvidia GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon HD3850)
The Witcher 2 Recommended System Requirements:
• OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista SP2 / Windows 7 (32/64-bit)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom X4
• Memory: 3 GB Windows XP / 4 GB Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Video Card: 1 GB RAM, supporting Pixel Shader 3.0 (Nvidia GeForce GTX260 or ATI Radeon HD4850)
