Im making a 3d model for my game. but it looks choppy when i lower the poly count.
im trying to keep it low but it just looks bad.
whats a reasonable poly amount?
Depends on a lot of factors:
- What is your target hardware?
- Is it a static mesh or will it be animated?
- How many of them will be on the screen at once?
- How big is it actually going to be on the screen?
- Will you be using normal maps?
how miny do you have right now
As I recall Unity has a limit of something like 60,000 polys (or triangles?) for a single model. In any case, I had models that came in just under that cap and they work fine on my 4 year-old laptop with an integrated graphics card- a wimpy one at that! I routinely use animated meshes with 25,000 polys with no problems at all. I’ve yet to determine how many I can have in a scene but I’ve had 10 of those in one with no noticeable slow down or problems.
Hmm, 10 animated 25k models on screen at once might be an issue. That’s a lot of verts to move around each frame. For OBJ importing I think it’s 64k tris or verts limit, although I think Mac ATI drivers have an issue where above a certain point you get a massive framerate hit.
25k animated is pretty hefty, thats 5 years+ ahead of technology for realtime. 3-6k depending on hardware is a reasonable target
+1 this is a good basic rule. Search the forums for similar topics, it has been discussed before a few times.
I’m only sharing what I’ve managed to do, not suggesting everyone use 25k figures. When I start making an actual game (beyond just messing around and learning Unity and the plug-ins I have for it) I will use much lower poly figures for all but the main characters. But to be honest, if I can run them on my wimpy laptop which is four years old, I don’t think it’s really five years ahead.
If you want to see how two 25k poly figures run, here is a little “game” I made using the Okashi RPG kit. There is nothing to do but walk around and fight an orc. Both the PC and monster use 25,000 for the base figure plus the clothes. Now that I think about it, I may be wrong about the orc’s poly count. It may be around 10-15k…
oh, and considering I figure a five year development cycle for any game I make, my models will be out of date by then!
25k what? Quads or tris. If quads, yes. If tris, then no.
The army guy in the unity boot camp demo has around 20k tris, so i wouldnt say 25k is too much really. But it was already told that it depends of many factors. I wouldnt use the bootcamp soldier for a strategy game where you need hundrets of characters onscreen. In the end it`s a thing of building a testlevel and have a look i would say 
we are talking about realtime, as such implicitely tris as we talk about tris and verts only in realtime normally
I’m mistaken… that base character is only 5200 verts and 7000 tris. The clothes are where the count skyrockets. The boots alone are 23k verts but only 3300 tris. The largest is the jacket which has 15k verts and 11k tris.
The orc is 15k verts and 19k tris.
this is all good news! thanks guys!
It’s the Verts that count on characters. Bones = Vertex Transformations.
25k Tris is a highly detailed character, and most of time is very little visual difference from 10-15k. There is no limit on how many for your normal map, and it’s wise to have lower versions 1k, 5k etc for LOD purposes anyway. 
Yea, Unity uses software skinning, so it’s a bit slower than what you might see for other engine’s recommended poly count for animated figures (depending on target platform), but still, you should be able to do an awful lot with 10K polygons (if normal mapped), and as callahan said, you’ll likely want LODs anyway. I wouldn’t read too much into the guy in bootcamp demo, I wouldn’t call that some kind of endorsement of a polycount for characters, they knew they’d have very few visible.
As long as you have LODs, having a high quality model is only a question of do you wanna bother making it, and requiring people to DL it (if that’s a factor), but it won’t impact your framerate.