Game Art Polygon Counts

larsmidnatt

I started this thread simply to get away from derailing another thread...

We were discussing how many polygons games push, and how many polys characters, weapon and scenes have. I'm a few years out of practice, so I just did a bit of searching online and can't really verify anything I read, but it is at least directional information in the sense it gives you an idea of whats going on.

Some links with counts

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/23520-Historical-Poly-Counts
http://www.rsart.co.uk/2007/08/27/yes-but-how-many-polygons/
http://forum.lowpolyworkshop.com/topic/9130085/1/
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975 -This one has a load of information in the 40+page thread
http://www.efgmagazine.com/eye-for/0/how-many-polygons-you-say.html -Has comparison pictures of Lara Croft in her original form versus her 2008 version

Here are a few examples, I got these from the links above.

Kingdom Under Fire : The Crusaders, Xbox, 2004
Main characters - 10,000 polygons
Characters - 3,000 - 4,000 polygons

Mass Effect, X360, 2007
Sheppard + armor + weapons - ~20,000-25,000 polygons

Lair, PS3, 2007
Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)

Crysis, PC, 2007
Nano-suit character - 67,000 polygons (uncertain whether it’s an in-game model or not) ¹
Characters’ heads - ~2500-3000 polygons
Characters’ bodies - ~5000 polygons

Unreal Tournament 3, PC, 2007
Weapon models – 4,500 to 12,000 triangles for the first person view

The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition
Geralt of Rivia (Blue Stripes) - 31,021
Geralt of Rivia (default, light jacket) - 26,091
Geralt of Rivia (outfit 2) - 26,088
Geralt of Rivia (rags) - 17,424
Geralt of Rivia (Seltkirk) - 31,624

Anyone know for certain the poly count for WOW characters? Not a game I play, but information on that one seems to vary dramatically. Specifially for WOW i've read anywhere from 1k to 19k. Mostly reading 4-6k.

World of Warcraft 2004
Characters - 4000-6000 polygons
http://forum.lowpolyworkshop.com/topic/9130085/1/

World of Warcraft Human Model no gear just the model and hair has just over 1000 tris.
World of Warcraft Human Model full gear with weapons and armor, the hole shebang, is just over 6000 tris at most.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/54832-3D-model-polygon-count...-How-much-is-optimal/page2

Any references would be appreciated.

For those interested in PC hardware surveys to help gauge targets for PC gamers
http://unity3d.com/webplayer/hardware-stats
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Valandar

The standing joke about polygon counts for game models over at Polycount, where a lot of game industry pros hang out, is "That's like asking 'How long is a piece of string?' "

Basically, the polygon count for any given type of asset is entirely dependant on the engine you're using, the purpose of the asset, how many assets will be on the screen at once, and what technical specs you're aiming the game at.

For example, on a current gen computer system, you can count on the following: (When I say Polygon, I mean Triangle, BTW :P )

FPS: Characters of about 15,000 - 25,000 polygons, weapons of 5,000-15,000 polygons, and props anywhere from a couple hundred to several thousand polygons, depending on size and purpose.

RTS: "Troops" of 2,000 - 5,000 polygons, buildings of same or maybe more.

MMO: Roughly a quarter to half the numbers of an FPS

Racing Game: Up to 60,000 triangles for each car, buildings and props can vary from a couple hundred for distant buildings to several thousand for nearby ones

RPG: Similar to an FPS, but often will have higher polygon counts for "hero" characters, especially the main character and any significantly important NPC's.

larsmidnatt

Valandar said:

The standing joke about polygon counts for game models over at Polycount, where a lot of game industry pros hang out, is "That's like asking 'How long is a piece of string?' "

Basically, the polygon count for any given type of asset is entirely dependant on the engine you're using, the purpose of the asset, how many assets will be on the screen at once, and what technical specs you're aiming the game at.

Exactly. Thats why I think it's great that there are list that note the game, system and asset with a poly count. My purpose of the discussion stemmed from a quote that the "average" game character was 2-5k, and that the Genesis figure of 18k would be too many polys to push unless it was alone with no environment.

I think the list demonstrates that 18k for an entire scene is not a lot in modern systems.

*again my disclaimer, I never suggested it was a good Idea to throw Genesis in a game....*

Valandar

Thing is, Genesis is 18k QUADS - or 36k triangles. On top of that, that's for Genesis with no hair, outfit, etcetera, and no smoothing applied. Add on all that (except the smoothing), and you're probably much closer to 50k -100k quads / 100k - 200k triangles, depending on the outfit.

So for right now, unless it's a 1 on 1 fighting game, Genesis IS too high poly to take into a game currently.

larsmidnatt

I updated my statement for clarity.

"I think the list demonstrates that 18k for an entire scene is not a lot in modern systems."

mjc1016

I was reading through some older Oblivion modding guides...and for Oblivion, a character mesh 'should be' in the 10 to 20,000 range.

Fallout 3 and Skyrim are somewhere in that range, too...more on the upper side.

The nif format used in those games has a hard limit of 64K tris...so they'll have no more than that. :-P

Morrowind was in the 5 to 10K range, mostly....and that's a pretty old game (but it was the 'system killer' of its time).

The thing is, it's not all about 'looks', either...the low poly meshes, with the liberal use of normal maps can look good...but they just don't bend/move smoothly, so part of the increase in mesh count is to provide smoother deformation/movement.

chris_82ea2f8ddf

I found the thread by searching for precisely the same answers.

If the player and other character models for the Gamebryo engine were in the 10K to 20K range as of 2008, then I think it is safe to say that the 17K LOD file that comes with Victoria 4 would be usable with decimated clothing and hair models added using up to a dozen or so characters on screen for most up to date game engines on typical PC hardware. Obviously I'm just guessing.

Practically speaking, the 4K LOD file just looks a bit dated. I kind of wish that Daz would provide an LOD file in the 10K range. That would be just about perfect.

Zev0

Valandar said:

Thing is, Genesis is 18k QUADS - or 36k triangles. On top of that, that's for Genesis with no hair, outfit, etcetera, and no smoothing applied. Add on all that (except the smoothing), and you're probably much closer to 50k -100k quads / 100k - 200k triangles, depending on the outfit.

So for right now, unless it's a 1 on 1 fighting game, Genesis IS too high poly to take into a game currently.

The new next Gen consoles are coming and based on the PS4's specs it can probably handle character polys way higher than Genesis for characters. But gaming is about optimization so I don't think they even need that much. Most of the magic happens with textures.

FirstBastion

Yes but game engine render those polies 30 frames a second, each and every second, in real time.

Aluworm

To give you an Idea look at it this way. When Everquest first came out models had 700 polys so with a raid of 50 people that would be 35,000 no clothes or weapons while the end game bosses were around 1,000 polys making it 36,000 then add weapons, clothing, backgrounds..... and you end up with around 70,000 to 85,000 polys. This was made to run on an old P3. Now by the time of EQ2 you are up to 7000 polys which would bring to totals to the 700,000 to 850,000 range running on a Pentium 4 1.5GHz Crysis 3 needs a Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 Ghz to run.and will have a main character heavier than the original crysis in the opening post.

So the first question is how many pixels can a game push? Depends on the engine, the Power of the PC and what extra features you have running.
The Second question is what type of game are you making?
FPS: Main character would have a large polygon count then everything else would have a lesser counts as you need more detail for the up close shots.
3rd person RPG/Action: Main would have a larger count than the mobs but much less than the FPS main.
RTS: would have a log poly count as you would need to have a large number of characters on the screen at the same time.

Let's say Game engine X can push 1 million polygons. you could have 20 Characters with a 50K count 40 with a 25K count 83 with a 12K count and so on. This would be Characters only on a blank screen so when adding more things to the screen the counts will drop.

Game engines use tricks to keep the counts down like using LOD (Level Of Detal) where you use lower count meshes for objects that are farther away and by only rendering what is visible in the game at the time. This allows you to have 67,000 poly count character is first person mode and only render the arm and hand holding a weapon thus lowering the work load the engine needs to perform all the time.

last of all game engines can not use the SubD systems of 3d renderings products or ray tracing, SSI, or Dynamic hair but they do have systems which can do the same thing. Tessellation is a form of SubD which adds height maps which allows details to be put on low polygon count things in game. dynamic hair strands are still on the very extreme of gaming power where you would need to have a top of the line system to run it. Go to Gforce.com and look up the video called a new dawn to see how far the technology has come.