Fairly simple question I’m not really sure about: How many polygons should a character or monster model have for a modern game?
I realise this comes down partly to how many polygons are in the scene generally, how many characters are likely to be on screen at once, what engine you’re working in and it’s going to pretty much be a finger in the air calculation- but any general guidance would be very helpful.
Should is very subjective, so I’ll just give some numbers we use at work. For the Java stuff, we are sticking around 1 - 1.5k (this is mostly a self imposed limited to keep filesize down), where most of the current gen games here (Guild Wars, CoH, etc) are in the neighborhood of 5k. The next gen stuff being worked on is around 10k. These numbers are very unscientific and of course estimations (not to mention, just me asking around). Also, generally, the Player models have ~50% more polys than the normal monsters (except boss creatures of course).
Have polygon counts not stablized as of late?
With the addition of bump mapping and self-shadowing to improve the graphical quality obtained from the same poly counts?
For instance, the character models in Quake4 didn’t appear to be made of many more polys than those seen in Quake3 - perhaps even less in some cases.
I’d be interested to know the exact numbers…
I suppose such effects are an easier way of making the games rendering scalable, without the need for performing polygon reduction on the models.
in quake 4 models have something betwean 1 to 2 thousends polys, but models look like they have much more, even 20 thousends, this efect is made through bump mapping and light effects which produce very nice effects especialy in higher dimension becouse they are made per pixel, 2 thousend polys is really enough for a model, you should much more think about general design instead of numbers etc, look for example on tribal trouble java game http://www.oddlabs.com/ , i do not think that models in that game heve more than 500 polys, or maybe i am wrong, but as a general everything look nice…
I’ve been trying to find a list of model sizes of, for example, the standard soldier models across all four Quake games, but I haven’t been able to find them anywhere. Not so much for guidance in my own stuff, more to see how things have changed over the last 10 years.
May 31 1996. It really was 10 years ago. I can’t believe I’ve been into gaming for that long…
AFAIK, tribal trouble doesn’t use bump mapping or any sort of mapping other than texture mapping
DP
i know that tribul trouble do not use bump mapping, i said that this game is an example of cool design and not much polygons must be used to achive intresting results, bump mapping was only related to q4